English-Only and Standard English Ideologies in the U.S.

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence G. Wiley ◽  
Marguerite Lukes
English Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourdes Torres

In this essay, I examine language use among Puerto Ricans in the U.S., and evaluate evidence that suggests that they are shifting to English more quickly than other Latino groups. This accelerated adoption of English might seem to be a positive trend to proponents of English-only or to those who fetishize assimilation as the route to success in the U.S.; however, the fact that it is very often accompanied by a loss of Spanish is troubling to those who value multiculturalism and bilingualism. The idea that Puerto Ricans are the group that takes the lead in the loss of bilingualism among Latinos is a source of debate for observers of the sociolinguistic reality of Latinos in the U.S.With a particular focus on the Puerto Rican community in Chicago, I first discuss language loss among Latino populations in the U.S. Then, I offer a brief overview of Puerto Rican immigration history, and of Latino presence in Chicago. Lastly, I address the allegedly exceptionally rapid shift of Puerto Ricans to English, and discuss possible reasons for this phenomenon. I conclude that even though there are sites where this assertion seems to be true, we need more evidence that captures actual language use patterns across a range of contexts before we can arrive at a definitive characterization of Puerto Rican speech practices.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xia Chao ◽  
Xiufang Ma

Grounded in the perspectives of language socialization and transnational habitus, this one-year ethnographic case study explores two middle-class Chinese sojourner families’ educational, bilingual and biliterate practices after their arrival in the U.S. It addresses the process that their middle childhood children experienced, from the excitement of the new English-speaking environment to linguistic and social isolation, to their adaptation to the environment and, finally, to transnational uplift. The families’ transnational practices throughout the four phases are shaped by their economic, educational and sociocultural dispositions that link together their country of origin and the U.S. They tend to cross national borders in language, literacy and education as well as to circulate glocalized English–Chinese biliteracy. This study reveals the disjunction between the families’ “imagined world” of the U.S. and the reality of a language barrier and ideological conflicts underpinned in an English-only society. The families’ transnational migration is an educational practice with access to their children’s “imagined world”. This study suggests that ESL learning should be considered as a socialization practice, which is tied to and structured by transnational fields in today’s globalized world.


2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Srishti Nayak ◽  
Inder Singh ◽  
Catherine Caldwell-Harris

Indian English only (IndE-only), e.g. “I’ll meet you here only”, is rejected as poor English by many IndE speakers. In the present study, we used a mixed method to investigate familiarity, comprehension and use of IndE-only in 20 L1 IndE speakers in the US. Participants completed a psycholinguistic task comprising syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic judgments of IndE, standard English, and grammatically or semantically odd control sentences. L1 IndE speakers’ task performance was compared to a control group of 33 American English speakers. Results showed that IndE speakers were familiar with syntactic aspects of IndE-only consistent with the literature, and were able to extract significantly more information about implicatures and conversational contexts compared to the control group. L1 IndE speakers were also interviewed about their attitudes towards IndE and IndE-only. Qualitative results indicated that despite some stigmatization, mostly in the written form, IndE-only exemplifies the emerging identity of L1 IndE.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Elizondo Griest

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home--only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation’s foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. Before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York/Canada borderlands, the frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between.


Author(s):  
R. D. Heidenreich

This program has been organized by the EMSA to commensurate the 50th anniversary of the experimental verification of the wave nature of the electron. Davisson and Germer in the U.S. and Thomson and Reid in Britian accomplished this at about the same time. Their findings were published in Nature in 1927 by mutual agreement since their independent efforts had led to the same conclusion at about the same time. In 1937 Davisson and Thomson shared the Nobel Prize in physics for demonstrating the wave nature of the electron deduced in 1924 by Louis de Broglie.The Davisson experiments (1921-1927) were concerned with the angular distribution of secondary electron emission from nickel surfaces produced by 150 volt primary electrons. The motivation was the effect of secondary emission on the characteristics of vacuum tubes but significant deviations from the results expected for a corpuscular electron led to a diffraction interpretation suggested by Elasser in 1925.


Author(s):  
Eugene J. Amaral

Examination of sand grain surfaces from early Paleozoic sandstones by electron microscopy reveals a variety of secondary effects caused by rock-forming processes after final deposition of the sand. Detailed studies were conducted on both coarse (≥0.71mm) and fine (=0.25mm) fractions of St. Peter Sandstone, a widespread sand deposit underlying much of the U.S. Central Interior and used in the glass industry because of its remarkably high silica purity.The very friable sandstone was disaggregated and sieved to obtain the two size fractions, and then cleaned by boiling in HCl to remove any iron impurities and rinsed in distilled water. The sand grains were then partially embedded by sprinkling them onto a glass slide coated with a thin tacky layer of latex. Direct platinum shadowed carbon replicas were made of the exposed sand grain surfaces, and were separated by dissolution of the silica in HF acid.


Author(s):  
A. Toledo ◽  
G. Stoelk ◽  
M. Yussman ◽  
R.P. Apkarian

Today it is estimated that one of every three women in the U.S. will have problems achieving pregnancy. 20-30% of these women will have some form of oviductal problems as the etiology of their infertility. Chronically damaged oviducts present problems with loss of both ciliary and microvillar epithelial cell surfaces. Estradiol is known to influence cyclic patterns in secretory cell microvilli and tubal ciliogenesis, The purpose of this study was to assess whether estrogen therapy could stimulate ciliogenesis in chronically damaged human fallopian tubes.Tissues from large hydrosalpinges were obtained from six women undergoing tuboplastic repair while in the early proliferative phase of fheir menstrual cycle. In each case the damaged tissue was rinsed in heparinized Ringers-lactate and quartered.


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