Eleni Griva

Young Children Talk about Their Popular Cartoon and TV Heroes' Speech Styles: Media Reception and Language Attitudes.

Considering the role of popular cultural texts in shaping sociolinguistic reality, it makes sense to explore how children actually receive those texts and what conceptualisations of sociolinguistic diversity they form through those texts. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine Greek young childrens views on sociolinguistic diversity in popular cartoons and TV series. Drawing upon a framework of media reception, we explored how attention to the ways children at age six interpret mediated representations of sociolinguistic difference might provide a methodological addition to tools used for investigating language attitudes and ideologies. From the analysis of childrens interviews, it was found that they can easily distinguish between different dimensions of sociolinguistic difference, showing an enhanced sociolinguistic awareness. On the other hand, their reading positions seemed to be in acceptance with the meanings conveyed in the texts. Moreover, our findings suggest that children tended to make hegemonic readings of popular cultural texts, premising many of their evaluations on the ways in which sociolinguistic diversity was represented in the text (e.g. plot, characterisation). The implications of these findings for the role of popular culture in the shaping of childrens language attitudes are discussed.

'Linguistic Diversity on TV': A Program for Developing Children's Multiliteracies Skills

In this article, we present a program designed for and carried out with young children, which was based on the four-stage multiliteracies model: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying creatively. The main purpose of the study was to develop children’s critical awareness of linguistic diversity through popular culture texts in a collaborative, creative and multimodal educational environment. The program was carried out for two school years: a) in the first school year, an intervention was implemented to 2nd grade children of a Greek primary school, and b) in the second school year, a similar intervention was applied to children of the 1st grade. In this article, we report on the results of the first school year’s intervention. The results revealed the positive impact of the program on children’s ability to easily distinguish between different types of speech styles due to geographical, age and socio-economic factors. The children understood – at least to some extent – that the texts of popular culture tend to display language diversity in a distorted and stigmatized way. The results of those implementations were very encouraging; a fact that stimulates our interest in continuing respective ventures by involving a wider sample of students and incorporating a greater range of popular culture texts.

Exploring views on heritage language use and bilingual acquisition: quantitative and qualitative evidence from teachers and immigrant students in the Greek context

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present a synthesis of a series of studies, carried out by our research groups, from the Greek educational context on teachers’ and immigrant students’ views on issues of bilingual acquisition and of heritage language learning and teaching. Albeit including heterogeneous samples and employing quantitative and qualitative instruments, our data functioned in a complementary way, forming a converging ‘picture’ about the status of heritage language and immigrant students in the Greek educational context. From the total of our studies, it was revealed that both teachers and immigrant students oscillate between the opposing forces of assimilation and acceptance of the ‘other’/resistance to assimilation.