Although numerous studies have been done on language ideologies, bilingualism and effects of second language socialization on bilinguals' conceptualization in both languages, these three areas of research are almost never brought together in one study. This study is an attempt to investigate language views of adult Russian-English bilinguals and whether there are patterned differences in conceptualization of these views depending on the language chosen for discussion. The study also inspects whether the articulated language views are accurate predictors of actual literacy practices in Russian-English bilingual families and parental choices of maintaining/not-maintaining Russian in their children. Since the frames of reference are so different in Russia/Ukraine (where the participants came from) and the United States, the language views articulated by bilingual participants are compared to those expressed by Russian/ Ukrainians and Americans to see how the participants' views are influenced by the process of second language socialization.

Studying issues of heritage language (HL) maintenance is gaining more significance than ever as our lives become significantly more complex and dynamic because of frequent migration and the transnational diasporas that such migration creates in its wake. HL maintenance is important in multicultural environments because familial relationships depend heavily on successful communication among family members. Viewing HL maintenance as a social practice, this exploratory qualitative study attempts to understand how participants are involved in their children’s HL maintenance by investigating, comparing, and contrasting the participants’ attitudes and practices. This study recruited eight Korean immigrant families with different lengths of residence in Greater Vancouver, an area that has seen a steady growth in the numbers of Korean immigrants. Combining social practice theory and qualitative research, this study uses discourse analysis to explore the participants’ language ideologies and beliefs about HL maintenance. This study also explored actual parental involvement in their children’s HL acquisition and maintenance. Furthermore, this study examined participants’ technology use as a means of HL acquisition and maintenance. In particular, the participants’ online conversations were examined to explore language use. This study supports the view that the parental role is important, even paramount, in children’s HL maintenance, but goes beyond this to show how technology can play a positive role in HL acquisition and maintenance. There are three central findings. First, a match between parental attitudes and behaviours concerning HL acquisition and maintenance and contributes to their children’s HL maintenance. Second, a mismatch or inconsistency between parental attitudes and behaviours correlates with children’s HL attrition or loss. Third, language revitalization can occur through HL and cultural practices in various online activities such as synchronous and asynchronous online communication, including access to Korean websites and playing games in Korean. To conclude, examining HL maintenance as a social practice offers new insights into the complexity and dynamics of the social practices of HL maintenance in the lives of Korean immigrants in Canada.

This qualitative study shared the voices of parents, students, and teachers and their perspectives on and experiences at community-based Chinese heritage schools (CHSs) in Southeast Texas. Their voices can be seen as critical inquiries that truly represent the phenomenon of after-school Chinese language education in the United States. With in-depth interviews and content analysis, this dissertation sought to provide greater understanding in: (a) creating a dialogue among the unique perspectives and voices of parents, students, and teachers; (b) documenting how teachers, first-generation parents, and second-generation students negotiate their own unique roles within the CHS system; (c) providing recommendations to school leaders, administrators, and teachers regarding particular methods of working with parents, to make students' heritage language (HL) learning more meaningful; and, (d) underscoring the contention that HL learning is a critical component of a functioning in pluralistic society.

Research shows that many immigrant children in Canada face challenges in maintaining their heritage languages, i.e., languages other than English and French or Indigenous languages. Public schools might not recognize or promote the use of heritage languages, many schools do not provide heritage language instruction, and in some instances, students and their parents are actively discouraged from using their heritage language at home. Heritage languages, however, should be maintained to help immigrant students succeed socially and academically and maintain stronger familial bonds. Language maintenance can also lead to multilingualism in a society, facilitating socioeconomic and international relations in the globalized world. In light of these challenges and the importance of maintaining heritage languages, this qualitative case study, informed by the work of critical theorists in the field of additional language education, was undertaken to investigate language maintenance in a heritage language school in a major city in Canada. Issues under investigation included (1) students’, parents’, and teachers’ perspectives on language maintenance, (2) the availability of language maintenance resources at home, school, and in the first language (L1) community, (3) successes and challenges of the students in maintaining their heritage language at home, school, and in the L1 community, and (4) the parents’ and teachers’ effort in facilitating heritage language learning opportunities for children. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, field-observations, descriptive and reflective field notes, and participants’ journal writing. The emerging themes included (1) the importance of language maintenance, (2) language maintenance strategies, and (3) language maintenance challenges. This study sought to raise awareness of language maintenance issues faced by immigrants, in this instance a particular Iranian community in Canada, within the contexts of home, school, and L1 community. In documenting students’ successes and challenges in maintaining their heritage language, heritage language teachers’ experiences as non-mainstream educators, and parents’ efforts to provide heritage language learning opportunities for their children, the research aimed to challenge immigrant students’ education with regard to issues of equity. Results are intended to inform immigrant families and communities, and programming and policy to facilitate language maintenance opportunities for children in Canada and other immigrant-receiving contexts.

Studying issues of heritage language (HL) maintenance is gaining more significance than ever as our lives become significantly more complex and dynamic because of frequent migration and the transnational diasporas that such migration creates in its wake. HL maintenance is important in multicultural environments because familial relationships depend heavily on successful communication among family members. Viewing HL maintenance as a social practice, this exploratory qualitative study attempts to understand how participants are involved in their children’s HL maintenance by investigating, comparing, and contrasting the participants’ attitudes and practices. This study recruited eight Korean immigrant families with different lengths of residence in Greater Vancouver, an area that has seen a steady growth in the numbers of Korean immigrants. Combining social practice theory and qualitative research, this study uses discourse analysis to explore the participants’ language ideologies and beliefs about HL maintenance. This study also explored actual parental involvement in their children’s HL acquisition and maintenance. Furthermore, this study examined participants’ technology use as a means of HL acquisition and maintenance. In particular, the participants’ online conversations were examined to explore language use. This study supports the view that the parental role is important, even paramount, in children’s HL maintenance, but goes beyond this to show how technology can play a positive role in HL acquisition and maintenance. There are three central findings. First, a match between parental attitudes and behaviours concerning HL acquisition and maintenance and contributes to their children’s HL maintenance. Second, a mismatch or inconsistency between parental attitudes and behaviours correlates with children’s HL attrition or loss. Third, language revitalization can occur through HL and cultural practices in various online activities such as synchronous and asynchronous online communication, including access to Korean websites and playing games in Korean. To conclude, examining HL maintenance as a social practice offers new insights into the complexity and dynamics of the social practices of HL maintenance in the lives of Korean immigrants in Canada.

This study contributes to what is known about the nature of unbalanced bilingualism that emerges in language contact situations by examining the morphological knowledge of Spanish receptive heritage bilinguals (RHBs). RHBs were exposed to Spanish in their homes and communities but received formal schooling in English. These bilinguals have been described as being "on the verge of culminating the language shift towards English monolingualism" (Beaudrie, 2009a, p. 86), although despite this they report the ability to understand but not speak their heritage language. While the interpretation and production of inflectional morphology are difficult for more proficient heritage bilinguals (Montrul, 2008, 2009), little is known about the extent to which knowledge of morphology is measurable in HRBs or how it contributes to their ability to comprehend spoken Spanish. To answer these questions, 33 adult Spanish RHBs completed four, aurally-presented on- and off-line experimental tasks designed to assess their underlying grammatical competence, their receptive comprehension skills, and their proficiency without requiring that participants speak, read or write in Spanish. These tasks and the skills they assessed are listed below. 1) A self-paced, aural grammaticality judgment task examined whether RHBs have access to the rules that govern the well-formedness of specific inflectional morphemes, including gender and subject/verb agreement, as well as tense, aspect, and mood morphemes. 2) A morpheme interpretation task assessed whether RHBs interpret the meaning supplied by bound morphemes and distinguish between semantic contrasts. 3) A contextualized listening comprehension task measured the listening comprehension abilities of RHBs. 4) An elicited imitation task measured the proficiency of RHBs. The results of this study show that RHBs do have underlying morphological competence and are able to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical morphemes despite their limited language skills in other domains. Additionally, these bilinguals interpret the meaning supplied by bound morphemes, although access to the rules governing both the structure and the semantics of these morphemes decreases in accordance with the order in which they were acquired in childhood. RHBs understand the majority of what they hear when listening to spoken Spanish, and on average their proficiency ranges from low to intermediate levels. An analysis of the linear relationship between the results of the four experimental tasks revealed that the extent to which listening comprehension abilities and proficiency correspond to morphological knowledge in Spanish RHBs is dependent on the degree of access that these bilinguals have to the semantic information provided by functional morphemes. The results of this study show that while the core syntax of Spanish RHBs is intact, semantic knowledge may not have been mapped to certain morphemes during the acquisition process. These results are analyzed in tandem with various hypotheses that have been recently put forth to account for the linguistic outcomes of contact bilingualism, and an argument is made for considering heritage grammars as completely acquired but distinct language varieties.

This dissertation explores Spanish nominal plural formation from a morphophonological perspective. The primary objective is to better understand heritage bilinguals' (HBs') phonological categorization of the morphological element of number in their heritage language. This is done by way of picture-naming elicitation tasks of consonant-final nouns and through comparison with first language, Spanish-dominant speakers and second language learners. In addition to the sociolinguistic factors of linguistic experience and quantity of explicit input, lexical frequency and morphological word class are also assessed. The recorded responses from the 148 participants are coded and submitted to a series of binary logistic regression analyses in IBM SPSS Statistics. It is shown that HBs distinguish between different morphological classes and that this has a prominent role in the pluralization of consonant-final nouns in Spanish. Moreover, the present research details the use of not two but three productive plural markers for HBs in Spanish: -es, -s, Ø. The interface approach adopted in this dissertation is proven to more definitively explain plural formation as it examines the connectedness between phonology, morphology, and the lexicon, thus overcoming previous accounts which focused on the influences of these disciplines in isolation.

Studying issues of heritage language (HL) maintenance is gaining more significance than ever as our lives become significantly more complex and dynamic because of frequent migration and the transnational diasporas that such migration creates in its wake. HL maintenance is important in multicultural environments because familial relationships depend heavily on successful communication among family members. Viewing HL maintenance as a social practice, this exploratory qualitative study attempts to understand how participants are involved in their children’s HL maintenance by investigating, comparing, and contrasting the participants’ attitudes and practices. This study recruited eight Korean immigrant families with different lengths of residence in Greater Vancouver, an area that has seen a steady growth in the numbers of Korean immigrants. Combining social practice theory and qualitative research, this study uses discourse analysis to explore the participants’ language ideologies and beliefs about HL maintenance. This study also explored actual parental involvement in their children’s HL acquisition and maintenance. Furthermore, this study examined participants’ technology use as a means of HL acquisition and maintenance. In particular, the participants’ online conversations were examined to explore language use. This study supports the view that the parental role is important, even paramount, in children’s HL maintenance, but goes beyond this to show how technology can play a positive role in HL acquisition and maintenance. There are three central findings. First, a match between parental attitudes and behaviours concerning HL acquisition and maintenance and contributes to their children’s HL maintenance. Second, a mismatch or inconsistency between parental attitudes and behaviours correlates with children’s HL attrition or loss. Third, language revitalization can occur through HL and cultural practices in various online activities such as synchronous and asynchronous online communication, including access to Korean websites and playing games in Korean. To conclude, examining HL maintenance as a social practice offers new insights into the complexity and dynamics of the social practices of HL maintenance in the lives of Korean immigrants in Canada. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

This dissertation investigates the linguistic outcomes of Japanese-English language contact in Canada. Adopting a sociolinguistic variationist framework (Labov 1966; Sankoff & Labov 1985), the main objective is to determine whether or not Japanese spoken in Canada (hereafter, heritage Japanese) is showing structural change due to prolonged contact with English. The study is based on naturalistic speech data collected from 16 Japanese-English bilingual speakers in Canada. A key component of this dissertation is the use of a comparative sociolinguistic framework (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001; Tagliamonte 2002) to assess structural affinities between heritage Japanese and the homeland Japanese benchmark variety. Speech patterns in heritage Japanese are systematically compared with patterns found in a commensurate monolingual benchmark variety of Japanese with regard to three linguistic variables, which are considered to be vulnerable to contact-induced language change (i.e. Bullock 2004, Sorace 2011). In terms of the first variable analyzed, variable realization of subject pronouns, it was found that the underlying grammar in heritage Japanese is shared by the homeland benchmark variety, showing that the variable is conditioned by the factor groups of subject continuity (i.e. switch reference) and grammatical person; the null variant is favoured by the same subject referent and the second person pronoun. Second, with regard to variable case marking on subject nouns and variable case marking on direct object nouns, it was found that the same underlying grammar is shared for case marking. For example, the constraint hierarchies in heritage Japanese were identical with those in the homeland variety for focus particles, with presence of a focus particle favouring null marking consistently for all types of nouns (i.e. English-origin nouns and Japanese nouns in heritage Japanese, and Japanese nouns and loanwords in homeland Japanese). The constraint hierarchies (and direction of the effect) for the other significant factor groups of verbal adjacency and sentence-final particle were identical between heritage Japanese and the homeland variety, with the exception of a reversed direction of effect for loanword subject nouns in heritage Japanese for the non-significant factor group of verbal adjacency, and a neutralized effect for Japanese nouns in heritage Japanese and loanwords in homeland Japanese when these nouns are located in direct object position. Considered in the aggregate, constraint hierarchies were found to exhibit a number of parallels across comparison varieties. This finding bolsters the general conclusion that there is little evidence indicating that extensive contact with English has had any discernible impact on structural patterns in these sectors of the heritage grammar. Furthermore, it was shown that no social factor group (i.e. length of stay in Canada) has an appreciable effect on heritage Japanese. Summarizing, the multiple lines of evidence emerging from the empirical quantitative analyses of the variables targeted in this dissertation converge in indicating that heritage Japanese, as spoken in Canada, broadly shares the same underlying grammar as homeland Japanese. Structural affinities in variable patterning shared by heritage and homeland varieties reveal little compelling evidence indicating that heritage Japanese exhibits structural change due to contact with English.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the entwined roles of schooling, family support and investment, and community contact in Heritage Language Learning (HLL), Heritage Language Maintenance (HLM) and identity formation among two groups of North American Latvians. One is made up of 49 teenagers at Gaŗezers language camp in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The other comprises 25 parents, other adult Latvian speakers and camp staff members. I explore differences and similarities among them by age, gender and self-stated national identity and language proficiency. Primary data consist of some 70 questionnaires completed by youths and adults and six 30- to 90-minute interviews conducted and transcribed by me. Six more were conducted via e-mail. Based on aggregate analysis of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, supplemented by participants’ individual responses to longer-form survey questions and to my questions during interviews, findings demonstrate a connection between self-stated national identity (Latvian, Latvian-American or Latvian-Canadian, or American or Latvian) and self-assessment of Latvian language proficiency among the youths. Among the adults, men were more likely to identify simply as Latvian than were women, and adults of both genders who identified as Latvian averaged slightly lower in self-assessment of proficiency, even though most of them grew up speaking Latvian at home. Additionally, my research shows a community proud of its HLM accomplishments alongside those of displaced peoples from other nations—a community now at home in North America, although 60 years ago members were determined to return to Latvia. Keywords: L2, Latvian heritage language revitalization, third space, lingua franca, language immersion, heritage language maintenance.