Preparing Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Teachers: Developing an Equity-Oriented Teacher Education Curriculum

As classrooms worldwide are becoming increasingly diverse, teacher education programs need to develop an equity-oriented curriculum, integrating domains of knowledge that prepare all classroom teachers to support the academic content and language learning of immigrant students. The first step of such an effort is to systematically examine the existing curriculum for its strengths and gaps. Using the conceptualizations of culturally and linguistically responsive teachers as an analytical tool, the study critically examined 31 out of 110 course readings required by five teaching methods courses of a US nationally ranked elementary teacher education program. The findings reveal an overall restricted focus on issues of supporting bilingual students and a discrepancy among topics addressed in different subject areas. The study calls for problematizing the “just good teaching” mindset, dismantling the deficit and monolithic portrayal of bilingual communities, acknowledging the complexity of teaching bilingual learners, and striving for conceptual coherence in curriculum reconstruction.

Codeswitching auf einem hochdiversen urbanen Wochenmarkt: Kommerz, Kommunikation und Identität

Today's European cities exhibit a great cultural and linguistic diversity. Highly diverse urban areas bring together people from different sociolinguistic backgrounds and thus facilitate intense language contact, with speakers accessing diverse linguistic resources that they creatively use and mix (cf. e. g. Wiese 2020; Otsuji/Pennycook 2010; Pennycook/Otsuji 2015). Such linguistic practices include code-switching. In previous research on code-switching the focus was on relatively homogeneous settings, mostly bilingual communities (cf. Poplack 2015; Torres Cacoullos/Travis 2015; Bullock/ Toribio 2009). As a part of a larger project, we collected spontaneous speech data through audio and video recordings from a highly diverse street market in Berlin-Neukölln that is popular among locals and tourists, the “Maybachufer-Markt”. The analysis of our data reveals new insights with respect to sociolinguistic motivations underlying code-switching. In light of commercial intentions, vendors try to switch to a language according to how they construct the customers’ identity (cf. Bucholtz/Hall 2005; Pfaff-Czarnecka 2011). Besides vendors also commodify specific languages or multilingualism (Heller 2010) based on their and others’ language attitudes or they switch to a language for the purpose of maintaining the communication in sales conversations. Correlating these different factors, we will argue that code-switching is used with a commercial motivation in interactions between vendors and customers.

Efficient Estimation of Children's Language Exposure in Two Bilingual Communities

Purpose The language that children hear early in life is associated with their speech-language outcomes. This line of research relies on naturalistic observations of children's language input, often captured with daylong audio recordings. However, the large quantity of data that daylong recordings generate requires novel analytical tools to feasibly parse thousands of hours of naturalistic speech. This study outlines a new approach to efficiently process and sample from daylong audio recordings made in two bilingual communities, Spanish–English in the United States and Quechua–Spanish in Bolivia, to derive estimates of children's language exposure. Method We employed a general sampling with replacement technique to efficiently estimate two key elements of children's early language environments: (a) proportion of child-directed speech (CDS) and (b) dual language exposure. Proportions estimated from random sampling of 30-s segments were compared to those from annotations over the entire daylong recording (every other segment), as well as parental report of dual language exposure. Results Results showed that approximately 49 min from each recording or just 7% of the overall recording was required to reach a stable proportion of CDS and bilingual exposure. In both speech communities, strong correlations were found between bilingual language estimates made using random sampling and all-day annotation techniques. A strong association was additionally found for CDS estimates in the United States, but this was weaker at the Bolivian site, where CDS was less frequent. Dual language estimates from the audio recordings did not correspond well to estimates derived from parental report collected months apart. Conclusions Daylong recordings offer tremendous insight into children's daily language experiences, but they will not become widely used in developmental research until data processing and annotation time substantially decrease. We show that annotation based on random sampling is a promising approach to efficiently estimate ambient characteristics from daylong recordings that cannot currently be estimated via automated methods.

Dimensions of social categorization: Inside the role of language

The present pre-registration aims to investigate the role of language as a dimension of social categorization. Our critical aim is to investigate whether language can be used as a dimension of social categorization even when the languages coexist within the same sociolinguistic group, as is the case in bilingual communities where two languages are used in daily social interactions. We will use the memory confusion paradigm (also known as the Who said what? task). In the first part of the task, i.e. encoding, participants will be presented with a face (i.e. speaker) and will listen to an auditory sentence. Two languages will be used, with half of the faces always associated with one language and the other half with the other language. In the second phase, i.e. recognition, all the faces will be presented on the screen and participants will decide which face uttered which sentence in the encoding phase. Based on previous literature, we expect that participants will be more likely to confuse faces from within the same language category than from the other language category. Participants will be bilingual individuals of two bilingual communities, the Basque Country (Spain) and Veneto (Italy). The two languages of these communities will be used, Spanish and Basque (Study 1), and Italian and Venetian dialect (Study 2). Furthermore, we will explore whether the amount of daily exposure to the two languages modulates the effect of language as a social categorization cue. This research will allow us to test whether bilingual people use language to categorize individuals belonging to the same sociolinguistic community based on the language these individuals are speaking. Our findings may have relevant political and social implications for linguistic policies in bilingual communities.

Multilingualism in eastern Indonesia: linguistic evidence of a shift from symmetric to asymmetric multilingualism

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: The Alorese in eastern Indonesia are an Austronesian community who have inhabited two Papuan-speaking islands for approximately 600 years. Their language presents a paradox: contact with the neighbouring Papuan languages has led to both complexification and simplification. This article argues that these opposite outcomes of contact result from two distinct scenarios, and formulates a hypothesis about a shift in multilingual patterns in Alorese history. Design/Methodology/Approach: To formulate a hypothesis about the discontinuity of multilingual patterns, this article first sketches the past and present multilingual patterns of the Alorese by modelling language contact outcomes in terms of bilingual optimisation strategies. This is followed by a comparison of the two scenarios to pinpoint similarities and differences. Data and Analysis: Previous research shows that two types of contact phenomena are attested in Alorese: (a) complexification arising from grammatical borrowings from Papuan languages, and (b) morphological simplification. The first change is associated with prolonged child bilingualism and is the result of Papuan-oriented bilingual strategies, while the latter change is associated with adult second language (L2) learning and is the result of universal communicative strategies. Findings/Conclusions Complexification and simplification are the results of two different layers of contact. Alorese was first used in small-scale bilingual communities, with widespread symmetric multilingualism. Later, multilingualism became more asymmetric, and the language started to undergo a simplification process due to the considerable number of L2 speakers. Originality: This article is innovative in providing a clear case study showing discontinuity of multilingual patterns, supported by linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. Significance/Implications: This article provides a plausible explanation for the apparent paradox found in Alorese, by showing that different outcomes of contact in the same language are due to different patterns of acquisition and socialisation. This discontinuity should be taken into account by models of language contact.

¡Hola! Nice to Meet You: Language Mixing and Biographical Information Processing

In bilingual communities, social interactions take place in both single- and mixed-language contexts. Some of the information shared in multilingual conversations, such as interlocutors’ personal information, is often required in consequent social encounters. In this study, we explored whether the autobiographical information provided in a single-language context is better remembered than in an equivalent mixed-language situation. More than 400 Basque-Spanish bilingual (pre) teenagers were presented with new persons who introduced themselves by either using only Spanish or only Basque, or by inter-sententially mixing both languages. Different memory measures were collected immediately after the initial exposure to the new pieces of information (immediate recall and recognition) and on the day after (delayed recall and recognition). In none of the time points was the information provided in a mixed-language fashion worse remembered than that provided in a strict one-language context. Interestingly, the variability across participants in their sociodemographic and linguistic variables had a negligible impact on the effects. These results are discussed considering their social and educational implications for bilingual communities.

Code-switching in parents’ everyday speech to bilingual infants

Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents’ code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French–English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings when their infant was 10 and 18 months old. Overall, rates of infant-directed code-switching were low, averaging 7 times per hour (6 times per 1,000 words) at 10 months and increasing to 28 times per hour (18 times per 1,000 words) at 18 months. Parents code-switched more between sentences than within a sentence; this pattern was even more pronounced when infants were 18 months than when they were 10 months. The most common apparent reasons for code-switching were to bolster their infant's understanding and to teach vocabulary words. Combined, these results suggest that bilingual parents code-switch in ways that support successful bilingual language acquisition.

On Sino-Turkic verbal functional expressions

Turkic conquest and rule of China since 386 CE for nearly two hundred years had exerted its profound and long-lasting influence on many levels of Chinese society. Turkic sinification policy had induced the Xianbei National Language (XNL), which was Turkic language with selected set of Chinese characters for phonetic spelling. XNL, being spelt in Chinese characters, managed to function in Turkic-Chinese code-mixing in the bilingual communities as evidenced in bianwen 變文. Because of the Turkic politico-socio-economical dominance, some the Turkic elements in the code-mixing eventually gained prominance and have become permanent part of the northern vernacular, predecessor of modern Mandarin. This paper discusses twelve such Turkic-rooted verbal functional expressions: (1). The causative-passive qu 取; (2). Transitive passive sha 殺, sha 煞, si 死; (3). Causative dou 鬥, dou 逗; (4). Continuative hai 還, que 卻; (5). Resultative que 卻; (6). Reflexive nə 呢 (7). Positive indirective mo shi 莫是; (8). Negative indirective bu dao 不道; (9). Future participle cai 才, cai 纔; (10). Conditional yao shi 要是, yao 要, yao bu shi 要不是; (11). INDUCE-base nong 弄; (12). The speech quote verb dao 道.

Bilingual newspapers as sites of multilingual practice

This paper discusses multilingualism in three publications aimed at bilingual communities in Britain: speakers of Russian, Greek and Tagalog. Despite the fact that the editorial content in such publications is almost completely monolingual, they are sites rich in multilingual written practices. The focus here is on display advertisements, which make up a large part of these publications. The paper looks at what language mixing practices are present, and what insights they may give into the nature of bilingualism in the community of intended readers. I identify two types of language alternation: in-line alternation involves integrating words from two different languages within one textual unit. Compositional alternation involves juxtaposing units in two (or more) different languages within a more complex visually delimited text, such as a display advertisement. While the advertisements themselves are good examples of multilingual writing, the mixing of languages itself is unremarkable and unremarked. Content in one language is rarely translated into another, while at the same time ‘seamless’ switches from one language to another are common. The advertisements in these publications seem to reflect the language competences and literacies of their intended readerships, where the ability to read more than one language (though to different extents) is taken as given.