This case study examines the attitudes of Jarainese people (an indigenous group in Gia Lai province of Vietnam) towards bilingual education related to bilingualism, the maintenance of the native language, its use in their own communities, and its perceived importance within formal schooling. The research employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods by which the data were collected. Quantitative data were obtained via 345 questionnaires administered to Jarainese students (N=173) and their grandparents and parents (N=172). Qualitative data were obtained via individual interviews of 13 parents and 5 focus group interviews with students. The qualitative data analyses were reported in three narratives as examples of the views of parents, and as thematic interpretations of the student focus groups. The findings reported in this thesis revealed the high degree of ethnic and cultural identity reported through the attitudes of the Jarainese people towards the use of the mother tongue and its maintenance. Jarainese people use their mother tongue to consolidate their ethnic and cultural identity and solidarity. However, the results revealed that Jarainese children tend to use more Vietnamese in their daily life whereas their parents and grandparents retain their oral native language. Additionally, there was a low level of self-reported literacy in Jarainese across the individuals surveyed. The findings disclosed that both languages are seen as important by the Jarainese people. They indicate that Jarainese people do not reject Vietnamese, because it is considered as a language of educational, social and economic advantages and advancement; however, they show the desire of the Jarainese people to affirm their cultural identity by retaining their native language. Despite this desire, the results demonstrated how impacts from the social milieu such as mass media, education and national dominance of Vietnamese hinder the maintenance of Jarainese. The findings confirm the results of other research in the field concerning the benefits and challenges of promoting bilingual development and preserving the native language. The results also confirm a link between demographic dimensions such as level of education, occupation, and living areas, and language attitudes. Furthermore, parents’ attitudes seem to influence their children’s perspectives toward bilingualism. In conclusion, this case study provides further evidence for the importance of values and knowledge related to bilingualism, as well as the need for bilingual development. This evidence is taken from a relatively unique context of the study: i.e., the communist context of Vietnam and under-studied indigenous minority groups in this area of the world. Hence, implications of the findings for bilingual education and regional language policy consideration are discussed. It recommends that the Vietnamese Government and education sector should pay greater attention to, and provide more support for, Jarainese people’s struggles to provide Jarainese children with minority language education. In addition, it is important to specify that a bilingual education program and a regional language policy should be considered and implemented in order to create environments in which Jarainese – Vietnamese bilingual children can develop and promote their bilingual proficiency and knowledge of bilingualism.

An international school (BES) in Greece, overwhelmingly attended by Greek origin children, has adopted, as its language policy, English as the ‘official’ medium of interaction, including in the Reception classroom, the target of this research. That is, through its language policy, the school aims to promote the learning and use of English throughout school. At the same time, the school has adopted ‘free interaction’ in designated play areas as its pedagogical approach. The aim of this approach is to promote learners’ autonomy and, in the particular case, it could be interpreted as including the possibility of using Greek. Thus, a conflicting situation has developed: how to reconcile the school’s English monolingual language policy and the pedagogical approach in the play areas? Reception educators are expected to police the use of English in the kids’ play areas without however undermining children’s autonomy and/or disrupting their ‘free interaction’. The feelings and views expressed by educators show that they are seriously concerned about how this conflicting situation can be approached. The aim of this thesis is to respond to this issue of concern by providing a detailed description of how the school’s conflicting policies are actually lived in the educators’ and pupils’ language choice practices in the play areas of their classroom. By adopting the Applied Conversation Analytic perspective of “description-informed action” (Richards 2005), a perspective whereby practitioners are made aware of their own practices and are left to “make (their own) decisions regarding the continuation or modification” of their own policies and practices (Heap, 1990: 47), the aim is to raise BES stakeholders’ awareness about the possible advantages, possibilities and limitations of their policies and practices in Reception, and thus pave the way to more informed language policy making and practice in the school. The data consists of audio-recorded naturally occurring child-child and childadult interactions in the school’s play areas. The analytic framework draws on Spolsky (2004), for whom “the real language policy of a community” resides in its language practices (hence the notion of ‘practiced language policy’), and on conversation analytic methodologies applied to language choice (Auer 1984, Gafaranga 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007a, 2009). The key finding is that, adult school members and children respond to the school’s conflicting policy demands in different ways, i.e. by orienting to different ‘practiced language policies’. On the one hand, as the adults’ ‘medium request’ (Gafaranga 2010) practices in the kids’ play areas demonstrate, from the adult perspective, at all times, participants need to attend to a language preference that is ‘institutionally-assigned’, i.e. adults orient to a ‘practiced language policy’ that is in line with the “declared” (Shohamy 2006) English monolingual language policy of the school. This shows that they have responded to the school’s conflicting policy demands by prioritising the school’s language policy (use of English) at the expense of the pedagogical approach (learners’ autonomy). On the other hand, children approach the conflicting situation differently. Children seem to have developed an alternative ‘practiced language policy’ according to which language choice during peer group interaction is not organised around the school’s “declared” (ibid) language policy but around their interlocutor’s “linguistic identity” (Gafaranga 2001). This alternative language policy allows the kids to attend to the pedagogical approach (learner autonomy and free interaction).

No description available.

Mitt syfte med detta examensarbete är att få en djupare förståelse om pedagogers tankar, erfarenheter och kunskap till att stödja tvåspråkiga barns språkutveckling. Genom intervjuer har jag kunnat ta del av hur pedagogerna enligt dem själva, anser hur de går tillväga för att stimulera språkutvecklingen i förskolan. Vilka möjligheter ges till barnen i förskolan för att främja det svenska språket hos tvåspråkiga barn. Resultatet visar att pedagogerna anser att barnens vistelse på förskolan är en språkstimulerande miljö där barnen dagligen tränar det svenska språket. Trygga barn har lättare att ta till sig ett nytt språk, därför ska pedagogerna arbeta väldigt nära barnen.   Pedagogerna arbetar aktivt med språkutveckling på många olika sätt. Pedagogerna menar att de själva bidrar genom att arbeta med konkreta material och tydliggör saker för barnen. Pedagogerna betonar även hur viktigt det är att samtala med barnen och kunna föra en dialog med dem, på detta sätt utvecklar barnet sitt språk. Att pedagogerna så ofta som möjligt sätter ord på det som händer och sker och även benämna och sätta ord på saker är också ett sätt som pedagoger gör i vardagliga situationer. Det är viktigt att pedagogerna finns där för att stötta och ge barnen ord och uttryck för saker som de inte har så att de kan förstå varandra i lekar och aktiviteter. / My purpose with this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of pedagogue’s thoughts, experiences and knowledge to support bilingual children's language development. Through interviews, I have been able to see how pedagogues as they themselves consider how they go about to stimulate language development in preschool. What opportunities are given to children in preschool to promote the Swedish language in bilingual children. The results show that pedagogues believe that children’s stay at preschool is a language stimulating environment where children daily practice in the Swedish language. Confident children are more likely to absorb a new language, why pedagogues should work very close to the children.   Pedagogues are actively working with language development in many different ways. Pedagogues believe that they themselves contribute by working with concrete materials and clarify things for the kids. Pedagogues also emphasized how important it is to converse with children and able to engage in dialogue with them, thus developing the child's language. To pedagogues as often as possible put into words what is happening and also the term and put words to things is also a way that teachers do in everyday situations. It is important that pedagogues are there to support and give children words and phrases for things that they have so they can understand each other in games and activities.

Sentence processing strategies by 10 bilingual speakers (Spanish: L1 and English: L2) were compared to 10 monolingual speakers of Spanish and 10 of English. Word-by-word reading times for ambiguous and non-ambiguous sentences were recorded. A paraphrasing task was used to determine the attachment preferences for a prepositional phrase placed after the verb. Multivariate analyses of the data showed that bilingual speakers combined strategies from both languages when processing ambiguous sentences in L2 that are non-ambiguous in L1. Furthermore, overall results showed that the three groups were sensitive to the attachment of the prepositional phrase. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of sentence processing and of language transfer.

No description available.

No description available.

Critical essay. Soon after the end of the Second World War, Samuel Beckett began producing French and English versions of each of his works. This raises interesting questions concerning the relationship between two languages and two texts within one literary work. Bilingualism is an essential dimension of Beckett's "oeuvre" which pushes the very limits of literature and explores essential aspects of language, identity and creation. / Creative writing. I was born in Montreal of a French mother and a father from Texas. My work in creative writing consists of six short stories set between the three geographical poles of my existence: Quebec, the United States and France. I also wrote a French and English version of my short story entitled The Ghost of Old Man Beck. These stories explore, on a more personal and creative level, the questions of bilingualism, identity and creativity raised in my critical essay.

Code-mixing, defined as intra-sentential language alternation, is known to demonstrate structurally determined patterns of restriction. Universal constraints have been proposed to account for these structural restrictions (Poplack (1980), Woolford (1983), Di Sciullo, Muysken and Singh (1986)) but have had limited success in accounting for code-mixing between typologically diverse languages. This thesis examines the structural principles that apply universally to the interaction of languages in code-mixed sentences. We argue that systematic cross-linguistic restrictions on code-mixing can be accounted for by a syntactic constraint that is sensitive to the distinction between functional and lexical categories. / We propose the constraint of Language Indexation, according to which (structurally) adjacent categories of like functional/lexical category status must be realised in the same language. We show how this proposal accounts for code-mixed data from a range of language pairs, including Tagalog/English, Moroccan Arabic/French, Swahili/English, Irish/English, Hindi/English, Spanish/English and French/English. A difference in the application of Language Indexation in nominal versus verbal projections is discussed with reference to Tagalog/English and Moroccan Arabic/French code-mixing. Finally, we briefly examine the implications of Language Indexation with respect to the code-mixing of aphasic bilinguals.

<p>This study is an investigationof the application of dual-medium and parallel-medium models of bilingual schooling as implimented at two historically disadvantaged primary schools in the Western Cape. The author assumes that parallel-medium in practice uses only one language of learning and teaching (LoLT), and thus lead to monolingual classroom practice. The author used qualitative techniques (observations, interviews, and document analyses.), and triangulation method, to understand the application of dual-medium and parallel-medium instruction and the support of principals and teachers in their understandingof the design models. Observations were made in Grade 7 classrooms at selected and document analyses, triangulated with interviews conducted with principals and teachers to expound the effective practice of bilingual education at school and classroom level. Document analyses were made of classroom materials (various literary artefacts) used for the development of language proficiency. in addition, how it contributes to the Grade 7 learnersacademic performanceand language development in dual-medium and parallel-medium classrooms.</p>