Juliet Langman

Variation in the group and the individual: Evidence from second language acquisition

Abstract This article examines the relationship between group and individual patterns of variation in one area of the grammar: verbal morphology. The results of studies of the acquisition of English and Hungarian verbal morphology by Chinese learners show that individual patterns of variation closely match group patterns on several dimensions. Multivariate analysis shows that frequency and perceptual saliency affect verb marking by all Chinese acquirers of English and Hungarian in a similar manner. In addition, separate quantitative analyses of individual speakers show that all the Chinese learners of English considered here are approximately twice as likely to mark perfective verbs for past tense as to mark imperfective verbs. These convergent results suggest that for first order constraints such as aspect, perceptual salience, and frequency, individual results do in fact match group patterns and that we are justified from an empirical and a theoretical viewpoint in reporting group results in studies of second language acquisition (SLA).

The acquisition of verbal morphology by Chinese learners of Hungarian

This article is the first variationist analysis of speakers of an analytic language acquiring an agglutinative language: we investigate the acquisition of the rich Hungarian verbal morphological system by adult Chinese immigrants to Budapest. Multivariate analyses of data extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with nine untutored Chinese learners of Hungarian suggest that the acquisition of verbal morphology is systematic. Factors that have been identified as significant in studies of the acquisition of other languages, such as frequency, perceptual salience, morphophonological regularity, and semantic complexity, all play a significant role in the acquisition of Hungarian as a second language. The marking of definiteness or indefiniteness of the object on the verb, a rare aspect of verbal morphology, also has a significant effect. Chinese learners are more likely to mark definite than indefinite forms of the verb, despite the fact that these forms express largely redundant functions and that indefinites are more frequent. Hence, our data allow for an analysis of relative weights of factors affecting acquisition and address the issue of the relative weight of frequency over other factors.

Classroom response system-mediated science learning with English language learners

We report on a case study examining the effects of a technology adaptation on patterns of discourse in a sheltered English high school science unit on electricity. The focus here is on how the tool, a classroom response system (CRS), affected access to and participation in classroom discourse with regard to developing science literacy among English language learners (ELLs), in particular Spanish speakers. Results indicate that, with appropriate pedagogies, CRS integration can provide learners with additional opportunities to become active participants and agents in their own learning by supporting teachers in reshaping their discourse patterns. We highlight how the CRS led to greater engagement by supporting a shift in the rhythm and participation structures of discourse. Implications for use in classroom settings by teachers with a range of expertise in instructional technology are provided.

Deictics and the construction of mathematics and science knowledge in the secondary school classroom

Abstract Taking a Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) perspective, this paper examines how the concept of deixis is employed in oral discourse in two secondary science and mathematics classes in the southwestern part of the US. Drawing on audio and videotaped data from two classrooms, we examine how verbal deixis, or words and phrases that cannot be fully understood without additional context, serves as a potential resource for the organisation of learning processes. We further consider how deixis may act as an impediment to the organisation of learning processes. We outline implications for preparation of teachers of English Language Learners in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics areas, with a specific focus on middle and high school science and mathematics.

Developing Oral Science Explanations: Secondary School ELs’ Experimentation with Intertextual Linkages

We present a case study of a 10th grade teacher with extensive Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) training as she guides students through a unit on density. The setting for the study is a Newcomer High School whose student body is made up of a range of English learners (ELs) from different countries, whose levels of English language proficiency range from low-beginner to intermediate. The aim of the case study is to examine the way in which the teacher and students develop scientific language and make intertextual linkages across activities as they engage in a process of appropriation of scientific knowledge and discourse. We further examine the relationship between the teacher’s strategies and the EL students’ subsequent abilities to provide explanations, a type of discourse practice that relies heavily on the ability to employ scientific discourse. Our findings suggest that a focus on teachers’ awareness of language in conjunction with their understanding of academic content are key to supporting the academic development of ELs in content area classrooms.

Peter Auer (ed.), Code-switching in conversation: language, interaction and identity. London: Routledge, 1998. Pp. v+355.

The last twenty years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of studies of bilingualism and language use among bilinguals. Perhaps one of the most hotly debated areas of bilingual language use is that of code-switching (CS), as the number of models attest. Various foci of CS models include structural analyses, examining in particular syntactic constraints and the relationship of code-switching to other phenomena, such as borrowing; social identity-based analyses, drawing on the relationship between language and identity within multilingual societies ; psycholinguistic analyses, focusing on questions of language storage and processing; and conversation analysis orientations, focusing on the local construction of conversation for interactional purposes. As Peter Auer, the editor of the volume under review here, argues, codeswitching is now recognized as a phenomenon ‘able to shed light on fundamental linguistic issues, from Universal Grammar to the formation of group identities and ethnic boundaries through verbal behavior ’ () and hence is worthy of study for both general theoretical as well as applied linguistic purposes. The current volume represents a coherent articulation and in-depth discussion of a conversation analysis approach to code-switching, which draws primary explanatory power from an interpretation of CS as pragmatic in nature. This well-organized and extremely thorough volume sets the conversational context as the primary unit of analysis, and argues that much analysis of CS need go no further than that local context for understanding meaning expressed through CS. A second crucial point brought forth in this volume is that a local conversational analysis allows for an interpretation of CS phenomena from the perspective of the speakers as opposed to that of the analyst per se through an analysis of interlocutor response. The theoretical orientation presented here, moreover, levels direct criticism at arguably the most influential model of social and pragmatic code-switching, namely MyersScotton’s markedness model (), which draws its explanatory power from speakers ’ identity with broader social categories coded through language choice. In contrast, as a whole, the authors in this volume present analyses that suggest that CS has, on the one hand, only local, pragmatic meaning, and on the other hand,  have meanings related to a wide range of social identities, not restricted to broad sociolinguistic categories. This volume, then, represents a call for a broader analysis of CS, beginning from a close analysis of conversation. The text is divided into two parts, the first considering definitional issues around the central concept of , and arguing for an expansion of our conception of code to include codeswitched varieties as regular parts of individuals ’ linguistic repertoires. Part I questions the essential underpinnings of other models of CS which take two complete languages and full bilingualism as prerequisites for code-switching. Part II extends the focus from conversational level considerations of code(s), to a comparison of ‘ the conversational vs. extra-conversational (ethnographically recoverable) meaning of code-switching’ (). Part I is introduced by Celso Alvarez-Ca! ccamo’s historical overview of the term , drawing on Jacobson’s discussion of ‘switching code’. Alvarez-Ca! ccamo argues for the possibility of a single code that comprises elements of more than one language. In such instances, he argues, one cannot speak of CS at all. Thus, Alvarez-Ca! ccamo suggests,