Acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in a Mandarin-English dual immersion school
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- As children acquire language and encounter new speakers and linguistic situations, they also acquire the knowledge of sociolinguistic variation necessary to achieve communicative competence (Romaine 1984). When children enter school, they encounter new speakers, a new set of linguistic situations and styles, and sometimes new language varieties or even entirely new languages. Children's exposure to new languages is particularly intense in language immersion models; in the dual-language immersion model, students dominant in different languages interact in the same classroom, and spend time learning in each language. The "dual" in dual-language simplifies the more complex reality of many such programs, in which multiple varieties of languages are in fact present (Rubinstein-Avila 2002). In dual-language immersion classrooms where teachers and students speak a range of dialects, participants must learn to negotiate between varieties as well as between languages. The present study seeks to investigate what sociolinguistic knowledge children can acquire in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English dual-language immersion program, by examining how sociolinguistic meaning is reflected and negotiated in the linguistic practice and metalinguistic discourse of members of the school community. This question is addressed through ethnographic and quantitative analysis of teacher and student language use, corrective feedback, and other metalinguistic discourse. The present research draws on data from a year-long participant-observation study of first-grade and second-grade classes (ages 5-8) at a Mandarin-English dual-language immersion program in the United States. Analysis of language use and metalinguistic discourse at the school establishes that, rather than simply imitating the speech of their teachers or classmates, students in the early elementary grades can make use of sociolinguistic information present in stylistic variation and metalinguistic discourse to target and acquire a variety distinct from that used by the speakers around them. This analysis of the variation present in a dual-language immersion school setting also suggests that the sociolinguistic information present in classrooms is more rich and varied than has been previously assumed, and equips students to competently navigate a range of linguistic situations.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Starr, Rebecca Lurie |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics |
| Primary advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Thesis advisor | Eckert, Penelope |
| Thesis advisor | Clark, Eve V |
| Thesis advisor | Rickford, John R, 1949- |
| Advisor | Clark, Eve V |
| Advisor | Rickford, John R, 1949- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rebecca Lurie Starr. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Ph. D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Rebecca Lurie Starr
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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