“Oh, I don’t even know how to say this in Spanish”

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Melgarejo ◽  
Mary Bucholtz
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Community Studies ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Know How ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Linguistic Accommodation ◽  
Realistic Representation ◽  
Culture And Language

Abstract In the absence of complex and diverse Latinx characters in entertainment media, film and television representations of Latinxs’ culture and language typically embody limiting and harmful stereotypes. However, the highly praised U.S.-based romantic comedy-drama “Jane the Virgin” offers a very different representation. With believable characters and complex linguistic dynamics, the show provides a positive and relatively realistic representation both of Latinxs across generations and of their linguistic repertoires as documented in community studies of Latinx language. Through an analysis of the linguistic practices of Latinx characters in “Jane the Virgin,” including patterns of intergenerational language shift, linguistic accommodation, and codeswitching, it is argued that the show acknowledges and treats as unmarked the linguistic complexity of Latinx families and communities. At the same time, the show oversimplifies this complexity in some ways, creating a representation that may be perceived as authentic despite its divergence from real-world Latinx language use.

You’ve got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette. Linguistic complexity and instruction in SLA

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick De Graaff
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Task Complexity ◽  
Language Performance ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Language Pedagogy ◽  
Instructed Second Language Acquisition ◽  
The One

In this epilogue, I take a teaching practice and teacher education perspective on complexity in Instructed Second Language Acquisition. I take the stance that it is essential to understand if and how linguistic complexity relates to learning challenges, what the implications are for language pedagogy, and how this challenges the role of the teacher. Research shows that differences in task complexity may lead to differences in linguistic complexity in language learners’ speech or writing. Different tasks (e.g. descriptive vs narrative) and different modes (oral vs written) may lead to different types and levels of complexity in language use. On the one hand, this is a challenge for language assessment, as complexity in language performance may be affected by task characteristics. On the other hand, it is an opportunity for language teaching: using a diversity of tasks, modes and text types may evoke and stretch lexically and syntactically complex language use. I maintain that it is essential for teachers to understand that it is at least as important to aim for development in complexity as it is to aim for development in accuracy. Namely, that ‘errors’ in language learning are part of the deal: complex tasks lead to complex language use, including lexical and syntactical errors, but they are a necessary prerequisite for language development.

scholarly journals Cross-cultural Training and Second Language Learning

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Zhonghao Zhou
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Cultural Awareness ◽  
Second Language Learning ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Training ◽  
Cross Cultural Training ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Culture Teaching ◽  
Culture And Language

Culture and language are inseparable, and cultures as groups adopt particular practices and norms of behavior. Culture teaching is a long and complex process concerning something more than language use itself. The two popular theories influencing practice today are the Constructivist and the Creative Constructionist approaches, and the technique for conveying cultural awareness is cultural assimilator, which has been designed for specific cultures around the world. Cross-cultural training can be used to promote cultural awareness, that is, sensitize people to the influence of culture on people’s values and behaviors and help them recognize and accept the existence of cultural differences.

Women Abuse under the Guise of Culture and Language Use: Women Narrate their Stories

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Seepaneng Salaminah Moloko-Phiri ◽  
Fhumulani Mavis Mulaudzi ◽  
Tanya Heyns
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Women Abuse ◽  
Culture And Language

On the Rentier

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (4) ◽  
pp. 905-911 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Robbins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Work And Family ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Financial Investment ◽  
Know How ◽  
Work Family ◽  
Investment Firm

In Antiquity and the Middle Ages they who received slave or serf rents or in modern times rents from shares or bonds or similar sources—these are rentiers.—Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation”On a long plane ride home on 1 january 2012, i saw the movie I Don't Know How She Does It (2011), a romantic comedy in which Sarah Jessica Parker plays a harried financial executive with two small children. The central issue is a common one: the conflict between work and family. And as is commonly true when this conflict is put at the center, the movie manages to be ambivalent about work without being very critical of it. It's not quite as uncritical as Mike Nichols's film Working Girl (1988), where we root for Melanie Griffith to make her spectacular rise despite the fact that the ladder she climbs is located in “Mergers and Acquisitions,” an activity then imagined as a sort of innocent corporate matchmaking. Three decades later and in an era when Occupy Wall Street has changed any number of conversations, I would like to think that studio heads have been obliged to consider possible adverse reactions to a heroine working in a financial investment firm. At any rate, I Don't Know How She Does It throws in one brief and unconvincing scene in which the upwardly mobile female exec unveils a new financial instrument that, she claims, will protect Americans' retirement income. This is, of course, an allusion, though perhaps a misguided one, to the widespread belief that if Americans today cannot retire when they had planned, it's precisely because of highly profitable trafficking in new financial instruments by companies like Sarah Jessica Parker's. But this belief (which I share) is not alluded to more directly. The only social consequences of work that seem to register are consequences for the heroine's family life. This means the movie can offer a simple solution to the work-family dilemma (no spoiler alerts: this film is already spoiled): if you're really good at your job, an appreciative boss will stop demanding that you pretend you don't also have a family. You can fly off to meet the big investors on Monday instead of leaving right now.

Region and language variation

2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.K. Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Soft Drink ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Quebec City ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Know How ◽  
Running Shoes ◽  
Primary Determinant ◽  
Independent Variable ◽  
First Time

Traditional dialectology took region as its primary and often its only independent variable. Because of numerous social changes, region is no longer the primary determinant of language variation, and contemporary (sociolinguistic) dialectology has expanded the number of independent variables. In Dialect Topography, we survey a representative population, and that population inevitably includes some subjects born outside the survey region. We want to know how these non-natives affect language use in the community. Admitting them thus requires us to implement some mechanism for identifying them in order to compare their language use to the natives. The mechanism is called the Regionality Index (RI). Subjects are ranked on a scale from 1 to 7, with the best representatives of the region (indigenes) receiving a score of 1, the poorest (interlopers) a score of 7, and subjects of intermediate degrees of representativeness in between. I look at three case studies in which RI is significant: bureau in Quebec City, running shoes in the Golden Horseshoe, and soft drink in Quebec City. These results introduce a new dimension to the study of language variation as a regional phenomenon and provide a framework for the integration of regionality as one independent variable among many in dialect studies. The RI provides, perhaps for the first time, an empirical basis for inferring the sociolinguistic effects of mobility.

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