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<p dir="ltr">The present study examined the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender in 22 bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 13;5 years; Med=9;4 years; STD=2.3) who were born and raised in the United States and acquired Spanish as heritage speakers—that is, they learned Spanish, the minority language, in a home setting (Valdes, 2001). Each of the child participants had at least one parent who was born and raised in a Spanish-speaking country before immigrating to the U.S. post-puberty. Eleven (11) of the adults/parents, (aged 18 to 60 years, Med=42; STD=8.5)—all native speakers of Spanish—participated with their children, providing a control group for comparison purposes. Specifically, the study examined whether child heritage speakers of Spanish have linguistic intuition that enables them to<i> </i>distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs of gender expression in Spanish heard in ordinary speech (Chomsky, 1965). An Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) presented each of the participants with both grammatical and ungrammatical versions of Spanish sentences in four grammatical conditions: (a) determiner-noun (DET-NOUN) assignment, (b) determiner-adjective (DET-ADJ) agreement, (c) noun-adjective (NOUN-ADJ) agreement, and (d) determiner phrase (DP) directionality (Cuza & Perez Tattam, 2016). Results showed that the participants—both children and adults—correctly found the grammatical examples to be acceptable. The adult participants consistently rejected the ungrammatical examples while many of the child participants had difficulties recognizing the ungrammatical examples as unacceptable. Statistical analysis found that the external factors of language dominance and language experience were significant in relation to the ability to distinguish the ungrammatical items, suggesting that the children who were dominant in Spanish and had more experience with the language were also more likely to recognize the ungrammatical constructs of the language. This result is in keeping with the Bilingual Alignments Approach, which focuses on the correlation of expected responses with the external factors of language dominance and language experience (Sánchez, 2019).</p>

Through increasing immigration, the U.S. society is becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse. Yet, as many U.S. language minority groups seek to assimilate, they face many challenges. One challenge is that their home language does not match the dominant language, English, that their children are learning at school. For Korean communities, maintaining Korean language presents a problem for families, especially for the mothers and children. The purpose of this study was to explore the U.S. Korean immigrant mothers' and children's perceptions of and experience with maintaining the Korean language and the effect that has on the development of social capital and cultural identity. I conducted two focus groups--one with mothers, another with their children, using a semi-structured interview protocol. I used narrative inquiry as my qualitative approach and then used thematic analysis to summarize my findings. I identified four major themes: (a) use of Korean language: positive and negative experiences, (b) perspectives on Korean language maintenance: benefits and limitations, (c) effect of parental involvement: provision of social capital, and (d) value of cultural identity formation: acculturation and the reality of learning Korean. This study revealed that parental support for children's heritage language retention seems to have an effect on language maintenance. Thus, because of this seemingly strong relationship, there seem to be significant benefits for children, families, and the overall society when the U.S. educators and other Korean immigrant parents strongly encourage American-born Korean youth to maintain their mother tongue in the U.S.

With the rising importance of Mandarin Chinese since the 80s, researchers have paid more attention to the Mandarin learners of heritage backgrounds who can understand or speak Mandarin Chinese before entering Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) programs. However, the study of Fangyan-speaking learners of Mandarin Chinese has been long neglected and still remains scarce. This interview study was conducted with twelve Fangyan-speaking learners of Mandarin in U.S. universities with an aim of investigating the linguistic knowledge and ethno-cultural identities that Fangyan-speaking students bring to college-level CFL classrooms. Another focus of this study is to investigate the perception Fangyan-speaking students have about their linguistic abilities and what Fangyan-speaking students are perceived to be the expectations of their instructors and peers. This study was conducted in two CFL programs: a long-established dual-track program in a research university and a newly-established mixed track program in a teaching university. Both Fangyan-speaking students and their instructors were recruited for interviews and document data were collected from both students and their instructors. A modification of Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (1981) was employed in categorizing four types of Mandarin input, in which Cantonese pronunciation for reading purposes and media consumption were found to play important roles in Fangyan-speaking students’ Mandarin learning. Analysis of the data also revealed that Fangyan-speaking participants’ ethno-cultural identities may exhibit a nature of “hybridity” (Young, 1995) owing to their family immigration histories. Implications derived from the findings are offered for researchers, practitioners, and administrators of programs that serve tertiary CFL learners. / text

Diplomová práce se zabývá základní slovní zásobou standardní češtiny ve vztahu mluvčím češtiny jako zd d ného jazyka. Jedná se o druhou generaci mluvčích češtiny, kte í vyr stali v N mecku, konkrétn v ezn a okolí. Cílem práce je identifikovat oblasti základní slovní zásob češtiny, které si uvedení mluvčí neosvojili p i ne ízené akvizici Teoretická část práce v první ad vysv tluje pojmy zd d ný jazyk, mluvčí migračním pozadím, nedokonalé osvojení jazyka a základní slovní zásoba s ohledem na né mluvčí. Dále na základ zahraniční odborné literatury popisuje problematiku vymezení základní slovní zásoby a tyto poznatky aplikuje na češtinu. T žišt m teoretické části práce je vymezení aktivní a pasivní slovní zásoby češtiny a její rozsah a základní slovní zásobu češtiny je nahlíženo jak z frekvenčního, tak z komunikačn pragmatického pohledu. Pro účel tohoto výzkum k výb ru základní slovní zásoby následn zvolen frekvenční p ístup s využitím Českého národního korpusu. Empirická část práce popisuje experimentální výzkum, ve kterém byla zkoumána aktivní i pasivní slovní zásoba a schopnost mluvčích češtiny jako zd d ného jazyka používat synonyma. Z výzkumu vychází, že tito mluvčí mají osvojené p ibližn čty i p tiny základní slovní zásoby standardní češtiny. Mezi nejobtížn jší slova pro tyto mluvčí pat í tzv. "faux amis"...

Over the decades, research on heritage language learners has been quite popular, but most studies concern Russian, Spanish and other languages rather than Chinese. The Chinese heritage language learner’s studies focus mainly on K-12 students and their learning motivations, writing characteristics, and identification recognition and those concerned with language acquisition address their vocabulary and verbal Chinese development. There have been very few studies about learning grammar. This study emphasizes on the acquisition of the aspect marker LE among advanced learners. To investigate the acquisition characteristics of advanced CHL learners, this study adopted the advanced CHL learners as the research group and the advanced CFL learners and native speakers as the control groups. A questionnaire survey was designed to investigate the participants' acquisition abilities. The survey utilized "similar semantics, different contexts, and English similarities" related to the aspect marker LE as the interference factors to investigate comprehension abilities and presented five different situations of using LE to investigate production abilities. There were 198 participants in the survey, and 183 effective questionnaires were collected. Analysis of the data showed the following results: all three groups of subjects are equally affected by "similar semantics" and "different contexts" in comprehending the meaning of LE. But CHL and CFL learners are more affected by English interference than NS. In the production survey, CHL learners did better than CFL, but not as well as NS. In terms of comprehension on the aspect marker LE, CHL learners did better than CFL, but not as well as NS. The understanding and production abilities of CHL learners in the United States are better than those of CHL learners in China, and the influence of English on both CHL groups is quite similar. The most important findings of this research are as follows: (1) Even when CHL learners reach the advanced level, they behave nearly native-like at language level, but cannot reach to the level of a native speaker. (2) Advanced CHL learners share similarities with CFL learners in production abilities. (3) The target Chinese language environment has no obvious influence on advanced CHL learners. The results of this study have the following teaching implications: 1) Students are more likely to acquire LE in context; 2) Students are more likely to understand LE after they have clearly understood the semantic meaning of LE; 3) It would benefit advanced Chinese learners in acquiring LE if their study program could tailor classes for them; 4) If the teachers are explicit in explaining the meaning of LE, students will be more likely to understand the semantic meaning of LE and utilized it correctly.

Heritage language preservation or conversely, a language shift (a loss or decrease of language proficiency) can directly impact a minority ethnic group's integration into a host society. Multiple theories and studies have demonstrated that students from an ethnic group who are encouraged to celebrate their ethnicity and practice their heritage language have better relationships with parents and peers and overall are more academically and cognitively advanced, less likely to commit crimes and have more economic opportunities available to them. In short, these individuals would seem more likely to successfully integrate into a host country's society. Therefore, looking at the Vietnamese community in the Czech Republic I attempted to gauge the standing of Vietnamese as a heritage language within this ethnic community by using qualitative research to better understand the existing sociolinguistic landscape. Ultimately, what I determined from my research is that heritage language preservation can act as a barrier to integration for the first generation if retaining the heritage language comes at the expense of learning the host country's language. However, for the later generations, a language shift is occurring which might actually hinder integration in the long run. Keywords Heritage language,...

In view of the scarcity of studies that in Sweden aim to investigate the relationship between motivation and linguistic competence of heritage speakers (Montrul, 2010: 9), the present study has two objectives: (a) examine if motivation, here understood as total motivation, is correlated with language proficiency of Spanish heritage speakers, enrolled in mother tongue classes, and (b) determine whether or not the underlying motivational subtype is decisive for the learning results, in Spanish, achieved by these students.    The motivation and linguistic proficiency of 51 students were surveyed through a questionnaire based, in part, on the self-determination theory and a proficiency test divided in two parts: a cloze test and a multiple-choice test. Owing to the limitations of the study, the main group studied consisted of 41 students, who were either born in Sweden or had arrived here before the onset of puberty, defined as an age of more than 11.     The analyses showed that only the identified regulation, a more autonomous type of extrinsic motivation, is related to the heritage speakers’ score on the cloze test, hence indicating that the concept of relatedness emphasized by Ryan &amp; Deci (2000) and the value placed on the Spanish language by this group, is linked with the range of their lexical knowledge. Factors that could influence the group’s linguistic proficiency, such as the number of hours spent speaking Spanish each time it was used (more or less than three hours) and the years of residency in a Spanish speaking country, were also investigated. Only the first variable, contact hours, showed a statistical significance; the second variable did not. These findings might lead to the reflection that although parental involvement is crucial, heritage speakers’ linguistic development requires a concerted effort not only by the parents, but also the school and the educational institutions, encouraging students to explore their identity and linguistic background through activities directly related to their own self-perceptions and interests.

Reading this dissertation means joining me on an 8-year journey that began with my desire to understand the lives and decisions of African immigrants in relation to retention and transmission of our native languages and cultures. The Akan say that <i>ntontom pe n'ase fi ako, na nframa ebo no</i>. Wherefore, like the mosquito propelled by the wind blowing me towards my desired direction, I sat under the shade of the heritage tree as I pondered how to get there. The journey became a quest to find an approach or methodology that will not just talk about African languages and cultural retention and transmission, but also center histories, worldviews, and philosophies while actively encouraging these values. Thus, approaching storytelling from the African oral tradition, I arrived at the development of the African Oral Traditional Storytelling (AOTS) Framework as an ethical and culturally centered approach to studying with African peoples. Because I wanted to go far and not fast, two heads (African families in the Midwest) collaborated with me by sharing through our African oral traditions and storytelling, our lived experiences of how we (as parents) navigate usage, retention and transmission of our living native languages and cultures while in the U.S. Emergent in this approach to storying, was the AOTS Framework. Now, what was needed was a description of the framework retrospective of the shared stories; what does it look like? What did/will she do, and how will she birth a transformative and relevant approach to satisfy that hunger for African histories, worldviews, indigenous knowledges and philosophies in research? The AOTS Framework, through African oral traditional storytelling, brings to the fore the relevant and essential role that African philosophies, worldviews, languages, and cultures play in understanding African peoples' experiences. Our stories reveal how our African worldviews and languages (embedded with our indigenous knowledge) inform how we navigate decision on 1) building a community of like-minded people from the continent, same country and ethnic group; 2) decolonizing our minds about the value of African languages, cultures, and worldviews: building a sense of pride in our indigenous ways and teaching them to our children as a resistance to neocolonialism and global erasure; 3) cultural, linguistic, and identity reconceptualization, revitalization, redefinition, and resistance; 4) conscious effort to use native language in the home; and 5) racialized experiences that influence decisions about heritage language retention and transmission. With that, we stand on the shoulders of postcolonial and decolonial theory, as we move through postcolonial indigenous methodologies in resisting imperialism and coloniality in education, research and language in relation to African peoples. Additionally, the AOTS Framework is the arable land that is not selective in growing varied linguistic, cultural, and philosophical perspectives of African peoples in research albeit challenges in relation to transitioning oral techniques into writing. As a framework, our desire and interests in learning with African peoples is not a question-and-answer approach. Instead, it is a collaborative, communal approach where the privileged gatherer shares in co-creating stories, meanings, and understandings with African peoples.<br>

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