It was as Head of Department of Languages in a rural high school in Southern KwaZulu-Natal, and as an L1 English educator in a primarily Zulu-speaking environment that I first realised the extent to which language is not neutral, and became curious about learners’ language choices in their community. My observation of rural parents sending learners to English multicultural schools made me similarly realise the extent to which language carries power. Language also carries ideologies and values, and can empower or disempower learners. At the same time, language is contextually and culturally embedded; and any attempt to explain language choice and language usage has to take a multiplicity of factors into account. This thesis addresses the topic of emerging bilingualism in three rural schools and school communities in Southern KwaZulu-Natal. In these primarily Zuluspeaking communities, an increasing dominance of English is resulting in bilingualism in what were formerly primarily monolingual communities. In particular it would appear that the bilingual education prescribed by education authorities is causally implicated in this emerging bilingualism. As a result, rural communities, like urban communities, are becoming melting pots where different languages, cultures and value systems are interwoven to satisfy economic, political, social and cultural needs. The South African Constitution speaks of multiculturalism and multilingualism as a defining characteristic of being South African. These principles are entrenched in broad national, provincial and local (school) educational policies. One such educational policy is the National Language in Education Policy (LIEP), which has considerable implications for schools in rural communities. While the LIEP postulates the eleven official languages as equal in bilingual education, in practice English is given an elevated position as the primary Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT). This paradox inherent in the iv LIEP appears to be having considerable impact on language usage and choices in both urban and rural communities. This investigation traces a group of rural communities which are currently experiencing a gradual transition from Zulu monolingualism towards increasing English and Zulu bilingualism. This study investigates this transition in the school and home context, as well as in its impact on the broader community. It considers whether additive or subtractive bilingualism may be emerging and the extent to which the educational policies of Outcomes-Based Education and LOLT may be causally implicated. The data collection methods employed include participant observation, questionnaires and interviews, which allow me to construct a detailed description of language usage, both in the school context, at home and in the community. In examining the patterns of the language choices of Grade 11 learners in the three selected high schools, I seek to allow the impact of the new educational policies on these learners and on their rural communities to become visible. I then consider a number of explanations for the types of bilingualism emerging in these three communities, in terms of varying contextual factors, the educational environment and the social and cultural identities favoured by speakers. / Theses (Ph.D.) - University of KwaZulu Natal, Durban, 2010.

This study investigated the underlying factor structure of second language (L2) cloze test performance as explained by a theoretical model including the following hypothetical constructs: cloze-taking ability, knowledge of language, knowledge of text content, and knowledge of contextual constraints. Eight cloze tests reflecting the posited factors were constructed and administered to 182 Francophone, university-level students. The factors were examined separately and in combination through a causal model building process. A model composed of three orthogonal factors was confirmed and accepted as the best explanation of the data. The results indicate that cloze performance is dependent upon knowledge of a specific language (second language or first language) and nonlinguistic-specific knowledge related to close-taking ability that crosses over linguistic boundaries. Cloze has been considered as an overall L2 proficiency measure. This study empirically demonstrates that factors other than language are significantly contributing to cloze performance. It also demonstrates the potential of a causal modeling approach.

With the growing amount of citizens with another mother tongue than Swedish, the need for assessment instruments in other languages than Swedish within the Swedish health care increases. To enable this, the knowledge of multilingualism and adequate assessments are required. The aim is to develop a modern Arabic version of a screening material that is comparable to what is used in the Swedish clinic in the assessment of people diagnosed with aphasia. In the present study, Short Aphasia Examination (Kortfattad Afasiprövning), which is one of the few screening material is available in Swedish and among the ten most frequently used assessment materials (Blom Johansson, Carlsson & Sonnander, 2011). Translation and adaptation was made to the Standard Arabic (KAPARABISKA) and Arabic dialect of Hadari (KAPHADARI). The results were also compared with the participants' self-rated language abilities. The study is also implementing a comparison between KAP and the Hadari Arabic screening version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT). The translated assessment materials were tested on six participants, where five had Arabic as their mother tongue and one participant had Arabic and Swedish as mother tongues. The result indicates that the Arabic versions of KAP and BAT are assessing the language ability of the participants almost equally, but that KAP is assessing reading and writing abilities on a higher difficulty. The KAP assessments were conducted during half as long time as BAT. Both the KAP assessments and the BAT assessment identified participants with limited literacy skills, which indicates the importance of inquiring the patient’s education level to avoid false interpretation of the results. / Antalet människor som är utlandsfödda ökar i Sverige. Detta kan leda till att allt fler människor som insjuknar i afasi har ett annat modersmål än svenska och med detta följer behovet av undersökningsmaterial och kunskap om flerspråkighet. Syftet är att utarbeta en arabisk version av ett modernt screeningmaterial, som är jämförbart med vad som används i svensk klinik vid bedömning av nyinsjuknade personer med afasi. I föreliggande studie användes Kortfattad Afasiprövning (KAP), som är ett av få screeningmaterial som finns på svenska och bland de tio mest använda bedömningsmaterialen (Blom Johansson, Carlsson & Sonnander, 2011). Översättning och anpassning gjordes till klassisk arabiska (KAPARABISKA) och hadaridialekt (KAPHADARI). Resultatet jämfördes även med deltagarnas självskattning av språkförmågor. Efter översättnings- och anpassningsarbetet testades och jämfördes alla bedömningsmaterialen på sex stycken deltagare, av vilka fem hade arabiska som modersmål och en hade svenska och arabiska som modersmål. Resultatet visade att de arabiska versionerna av KAP och BAT bedömde språkförmågorna hos samtliga deltagare på ett likvärdigt sätt, men att KAP bedömer vissa språkliga förmågor med en högre svårighetsgrad. KAP tog ungefär hälften så lång tid att genomföra än BAT. Båda bedömningsmaterialen identifierade deltagare med begränsad läs- och skrivförmåga vilket visades i intervjun och självskattningen. Patientens skolgång bör därför efterfrågas för att undvika feltolkning av resultat.

Individual differences in early literacy skills can be attributed to children’s previous history of emergent literacy experiences during their preschool years. The purpose of this qualitative study was to learn about the emergent literacy experiences of one Libyan American preschooler and one Syrian American preschooler and how their families support these experiences in their bilingual homes. Through the lens of social theory of learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) and sociocultural theory (Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1978), this multi-case study was designed to explore family literacy practices with a preschooler in a naturalistic setting. The questions guiding this study were: (1) How did the texts, tools, and technologies available in two bilingual home settings impact the emergent literacy practices of a Libyan American child and a Syrian American child? (2) What support did family members provide for these two children as they developed emergent literacy practices in their bilingual home settings? Data sources included a demographic questionnaire, digital-recordings of family literacy practices with a preschooler, audio-recorded in-depth interviews with the parents, home visits, the preschoolers’ writing samples, and photographs of literacy activities, materials, and the home environment. The recorded family literacy practices and interviews were transcribed and analyzed to identify emerging themes. Both within-case analysis and cross-case analysis were conducted. Findings revealed that the preschoolers in both families use a multimodal process such as talking, drawing, singing, chanting, recitation, technologies, and sociodramatic play in their daily literacy experiences. The parents are not concerned with teaching their children specific literacy skills; but they naturally use techniques for keeping them on task and questioning skills to enhance oral language and comprehension development. These families’ home literacy practices are Americanized by living in the mainstream social group, and English is frequently used among the family members. However, their bilingualism and religious literacy practices enrich and vary their children’s emergent literacy experiences and their family literacy practices. The significance of this study resides in the importance of getting to know individual families’ backgrounds to better understand and respect the cultural practices of family literacy.

French Immersion teachers are constantly frustrated by both the amount of and skill level of their students when using French in informal situations. My research attempts to answer: How can informal language be taught in the French Immersion context? Will teaching informal language in a systematic way in a Classroom Community of Practice improve the frequency of second language (L2) use by FI students in peer-to-peer interactions? Can we teach students to actually speak French – to spontaneously communicate in informal situations? Informal language is the language used in conversations and interactions beyond academic topics or class time such as conversations between students during group work, on field trips and during games and play time. Is it through pedagogical approaches or by developing a clearer understanding of the community of practice necessary for a successful language classroom? This study is an action research study conducted in Victoria, British Columbia with a team of 5 teachers, including the researcher as co-participant. Grounded theory was used to analyze the findings and the themes of ‘spaces’ are presented using creative nonfiction to recount the participants’ stories. The study concludes that it is the importance of the teacher as member of both the classroom community and as member of a community of educators that is critical to success. / Graduate

Detta arbete ska ge oss en insyn i hur samarbete och samspel mellan förskollärare och modersmålspedagoger sker i förskolan. / The purpose of the study is to examine pedagogue’s awareness of environment, interactions and working methods in the work of multilingual children. The study can give us knowledge about the work that is in the process of multilingual children. The study may also give us an idea of how cooperation takes place between preschool teachers and the native language teachers in the work of multilingual children. The study has given us a deeper knowledge of the interaction between native language educators, children and preschool teachers. The importance of the preschool teacher´s skills and awareness for the children´s language development and the cooperation between preschool teachers, native language teachers and children are also important to this study. Therefore it is important to see how the interaction contributes to multilingual children´s development in preschool. In this study we have also received native language teachers and preschool teacher´s perspective why the native language is important for bilingual children. The research method we chose for our study was the qualitative method. The qualitative method indicated how researchers can obtain the raw data. Four preschool teachers and three native language educators were interviewed (Denscombe, 2009). The result revealed that the cooperation between pedagogues, pedagogues working methods and its conditions played a role in how the two parties were working along with multilingual children. The result also presented that preschool teachers and native language teachers both strive to have a good cooperation with each other. In our study, we assumed Vygotsky's sociocultural theory which involves educators should use communication and collaboration to help bilingual children develop their language.

The purpose of my study is to examine how four teachers in a pre school believe they relates to and reasons about bilingualism. To be able to realize thisstudy, i proposed three issue following: How do the teachers in kindergarten relate to bilingualism? How do teachers in preschool reason around the work of bilingual children? What do teachers think about the educational environment in relation to language development?

Huvudsyftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur förskollärare arbetar med flerspråkiga barn i förskolan. Jag valde att använda mig av en kvalitativ intervjumetod, då jag ville ha pedagogernas resonemang och åsikter. Båda förskolorna som jag har varit på och gjort mina intervjuer på visar att pedagogerna visar ett stort intresse genom sin nyfikenhet av att lära sig ord och fraser på barnens olika språk. Pedagogerna tar sin hjälp genom att de använder sig av föräldrarna för att få tillgång till ord och fraser som hjälper pedagogerna i verksamheten. Det är övervägande bland pedagogerna att de uppmuntrar barnen om att prata sitt modersmål även på förskolan med varandra, pedagogerna påpekar även hur viktigt det är att föräldrarna pratar sitt modersmål hemma med barnen. Pedagogerna vill att varje barn ska känna stolthet över sitt ursprung, språk och kultur. Förskolorna använder sig av sång, musik och sagor, de delade även in barnen i smågrupper för att alla ska få komma till tals. Ladberg skriver om att sagor är ett bra och rikt material där barnen lär sig nya ord. Hon poängterar även att det är bra att dela in barnen i smågrupper där barnen är ungefär i samma språkliga nivå. Barn som inte förstår ledsnar och tappar koncentrationen, ger upp ”stänger av” för språket. Sagor läses bäst i smågrupper (Ladberg 2003, s. 157, 158). Resultatet visar att pedagogerna visar ett förhållningssätt som bygger på en nyfikenhet hos pedagogerna, lyssnar, samtalar och forskar tillsammans med barnen. Pedagogerna ger barnen en delaktighet genom att plocka fram barnens läroprocesser och utveckling genom läroplansmålen (Lpfö 98 reviderad 2010, s. 9, 10). / The main purpose of this study was to look how preschool teatchers work with multilingual children in preschool. I chose to use a qualitative interview method, since the teachers reasoning and opinions were at value. That was my interest in this study. Both preschools that I have been to and done my interviews at show a great interest by their curiosity to learn words and phrases in different languages. The teachers use the children´s parents for access for new words. It is predominant among the teachers to encourage the children to speak their mother tongue with each other in preschool, and the teachers also point out how important it is that the parents speak the mother tongue at home with the children. The teatchers wish is that every child should feel proud of their origin, language and culture. The preschool used song, music and fairy tales and they also divided the children into smaller groups so everyone could have their say. Ladberg describes how fairy tales are a good and abundant material were the children learn new words. She also points out that it´s good to divide the children into differnet small groups were they´re approximately at the same level. Children who don´t understand become sad and lose their concentration, give up ”shut down” the language. The best way is to read fairy tales in small groups (Ladberg 2003, s. 157, 158). The difficulty to work with multilingual children is that the teachers sometimes don´t know if the children understand what teachers are saying. The result shows that the teachers show an approach, which is based on curiosity of the teachers and listen, converse, and do research togheter with the children. The teachers give the children participation by bring out children´s processing of learning and development by the goals of the curriculum (Lpfö 98 2010, s. 9, 10).

This study examines knowledge of grammar by receptive bilinguals (RBs) - heritage speakers who describe themselves as capable of fluent comprehension in Labrador Inuttitut (an endangered dialect of Inuktitut), but of little or no speech production in it. Despite the growing research on incomplete acquisition, RBs have yet to be studied as a specific population. Participants (8 fluent bilinguals, 17 RBs, 3 low-proficiency RBs) performed a morpheme comprehension task and a grammaticality judgment task. General measures of their comprehension and production abilities included a story retelling task as an overall assessment of comprehension, a vocabulary test, an elicited imitation task, and a production task. This data was complemented by language behaviour interviews. The results showed that RBs have good, though not perfect, comprehension and basic vocabulary, but speech production is very difficult for them. They have grammatical knowledge, but it is incomplete: Knowledge of some structures is robust, and their comprehension is fluent (past vs. future contrast, aspectual morphemes); others are missing (temporal remoteness degrees); and yet for others (case and agreement), RBs have the category and know its position in the word structure, but have difficulty connecting the features with the morphemes expressing them. These findings explain the significant asymmetry between comprehension and production in RBs: In comprehension, incomplete knowledge may result in loss of some aspects of meaning, but in many cases it can be compensated for by pragmatic knowledge and extralinguistic context, while in production, it can result in the selection of an incorrect morpheme or inability to select a morpheme. Low-proficiency RBs have partial comprehension, small vocabulary, and almost no production. They do not understand most functional morphemes; however, they show knowledge of the basic properties such as the position of the obligatory agreement marker on the verb. This study provides data on an understudied language and an understudied population at the extreme end of unbalanced bilingualism. The findings have implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization, especially in the context of a language shift in indigenous language communities, where RBs are often the last generation to have competence in the indigenous language.

This study examines knowledge of grammar by receptive bilinguals (RBs) - heritage speakers who describe themselves as capable of fluent comprehension in Labrador Inuttitut (an endangered dialect of Inuktitut), but of little or no speech production in it. Despite the growing research on incomplete acquisition, RBs have yet to be studied as a specific population. Participants (8 fluent bilinguals, 17 RBs, 3 low-proficiency RBs) performed a morpheme comprehension task and a grammaticality judgment task. General measures of their comprehension and production abilities included a story retelling task as an overall assessment of comprehension, a vocabulary test, an elicited imitation task, and a production task. This data was complemented by language behaviour interviews. The results showed that RBs have good, though not perfect, comprehension and basic vocabulary, but speech production is very difficult for them. They have grammatical knowledge, but it is incomplete: Knowledge of some structures is robust, and their comprehension is fluent (past vs. future contrast, aspectual morphemes); others are missing (temporal remoteness degrees); and yet for others (case and agreement), RBs have the category and know its position in the word structure, but have difficulty connecting the features with the morphemes expressing them. These findings explain the significant asymmetry between comprehension and production in RBs: In comprehension, incomplete knowledge may result in loss of some aspects of meaning, but in many cases it can be compensated for by pragmatic knowledge and extralinguistic context, while in production, it can result in the selection of an incorrect morpheme or inability to select a morpheme. Low-proficiency RBs have partial comprehension, small vocabulary, and almost no production. They do not understand most functional morphemes; however, they show knowledge of the basic properties such as the position of the obligatory agreement marker on the verb. This study provides data on an understudied language and an understudied population at the extreme end of unbalanced bilingualism. The findings have implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization, especially in the context of a language shift in indigenous language communities, where RBs are often the last generation to have competence in the indigenous language.