http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1255 Thu, 23 May 2013 09:30:54 GMT 2013-05-23T09:30:54Z http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk:80/retrieve/3021/lellogo.gif http://hdl.handle.net/1842/1255 http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6677 Title: When language policy and pedagogy conflict: pupils’ and educators’ ‘practiced language policies’ in an English-medium kindergarten classroom in Greece Authors: Papageorgiou, Ifigenia Abstract: An international school (BES) in Greece, overwhelmingly attended by Greek origin children, has adopted, as its language policy, English as the ‘official’ medium of interaction, including in the Reception classroom, the target of this research. That is, through its language policy, the school aims to promote the learning and use of English throughout school. At the same time, the school has adopted ‘free interaction’ in designated play areas as its pedagogical approach. The aim of this approach is to promote learners’ autonomy and, in the particular case, it could be interpreted as including the possibility of using Greek. Thus, a conflicting situation has developed: how to reconcile the school’s English monolingual language policy and the pedagogical approach in the play areas? Reception educators are expected to police the use of English in the kids’ play areas without however undermining children’s autonomy and/or disrupting their ‘free interaction’. The feelings and views expressed by educators show that they are seriously concerned about how this conflicting situation can be approached. The aim of this thesis is to respond to this issue of concern by providing a detailed description of how the school’s conflicting policies are actually lived in the educators’ and pupils’ language choice practices in the play areas of their classroom. By adopting the Applied Conversation Analytic perspective of “description-informed action” (Richards 2005), a perspective whereby practitioners are made aware of their own practices and are left to “make (their own) decisions regarding the continuation or modification” of their own policies and practices (Heap, 1990: 47), the aim is to raise BES stakeholders’ awareness about the possible advantages, possibilities and limitations of their policies and practices in Reception, and thus pave the way to more informed language policy making and practice in the school. The data consists of audio-recorded naturally occurring child-child and childadult interactions in the school’s play areas. The analytic framework draws on Spolsky (2004), for whom “the real language policy of a community” resides in its language practices (hence the notion of ‘practiced language policy’), and on conversation analytic methodologies applied to language choice (Auer 1984, Gafaranga 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007a, 2009). The key finding is that, adult school members and children respond to the school’s conflicting policy demands in different ways, i.e. by orienting to different ‘practiced language policies’. On the one hand, as the adults’ ‘medium request’ (Gafaranga 2010) practices in the kids’ play areas demonstrate, from the adult perspective, at all times, participants need to attend to a language preference that is ‘institutionally-assigned’, i.e. adults orient to a ‘practiced language policy’ that is in line with the “declared” (Shohamy 2006) English monolingual language policy of the school. This shows that they have responded to the school’s conflicting policy demands by prioritising the school’s language policy (use of English) at the expense of the pedagogical approach (learners’ autonomy). On the other hand, children approach the conflicting situation differently. Children seem to have developed an alternative ‘practiced language policy’ according to which language choice during peer group interaction is not organised around the school’s “declared” (ibid) language policy but around their interlocutor’s “linguistic identity” (Gafaranga 2001). This alternative language policy allows the kids to attend to the pedagogical approach (learner autonomy and free interaction). Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6677 2012-11-28T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6577 Title: Policy, planning and perceptions in the European Union: a comparative perspective on minority language vitality Authors: Kronenthal, Melissa Abstract: Over the last few decades, minority language issues have been attracting increasing attention in the media, among academics, and in the affairs of national governments and international organizations. Nowhere has this been truer than in the European Union, where concern over the ‘endangered languages crisis’ has led to an increasing awareness of Europe’s small languages and of the challenges they face in a globalised, English-dominated linguistic marketplace. A more tangible outcome of this concern has been a growth in rhetoric within EU institutions advocating a general respect for multilingualism and linguistic diversity, and a series of support measures and resolutions designed to guarantee this. Despite the widespread rhetoric of concern and support, however, in terms of concrete legislation there is still a wide gap between debate and policy in Europe, and until now it has been left unclear to what extent this gap is actually affecting the vitality and prospects of individual minority languages. This dissertation addresses this question by analysing how the European Union, both in the by-products of the integration process and in its deliberate rhetoric of support, is impacting the vitality of three specific minority language communities: Galician in Spain, Corsican in France and Sorbian in Germany. Drawing upon research collected via sociolinguistic surveys in these communities, it attempts to gauge whether Europe as an integrated entity is positively or negatively affecting the prospects of minority languages within its borders; if member state policies toward their minorities have been positively swayed by European rhetoric; if minority language speakers themselves see a positive effect on language use from European policy and promotion; and whether the role of English as a necessary lingua franca inside and outside Europe is eroding the position of the minority languages as the second language of choice. Quantitative and qualitative analysis on the survey results indicate that unfortunately, despite the amount of attention these minority languages receive from both government and media, language decline seems to show no sign of abating in any of these communities, and indeed the actions of the EU are apparently having very little impact on individual language situations. In addition, the survey indicates that hostile or indifferent member state policy is continuing to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to minority language maintenance in Europe. From this perspective it seems reasonable to assess that the EU has in effect failed at what it claims to be trying to achieve, namely to provide a social and political climate that is favourable to minority language maintenance, and to assume that if this is the case in these three communities it is likely to be the case across Europe. With this in mind, the study concludes with the recommendation that the EU reconsider its involvement in language matters across the board, particularly in its current working-language structure and the reluctance to put some force of law behind its minority language support, and cautions that without this, the EU will likely face the imminent erosion of much of the very diversity upon which it has been built. Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6577 2007-06-27T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6549 Title: Agency and argument realization in early child Inuktitut Authors: Notaker, Nikolai Abstract: Argument realization, and particularly argument omission, is a subject that has been widely studied in the field of child language research, and several different theories have been put forth to explain this phenomenon. In this study, semantic agency is proposed as a contributing factor. To test this, corpus data of four children acquiring Inuktitut were coded for agency on the grammatical subjects produced by the children. Statistical analyses were performed to assess the relationship between subject argument form and agency. A qualitative analysis of the verb semantics associated with non-agent subjects was also performed. While the analyses yielded some statistically significant results, no clear relationship between these factors could be identified. The qualitative analysis, on the other hand, did appear to reveal a weak trend in terms of a relationship between verb semantics and argument realization. The findings are discussed in terms of the broader aspects of the development of agency, transitivity, and ergativity. Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6549 2010-11-24T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6510 Title: Anaphoric Preferences of Null and Overt Subjects in Italian and Spanish: a Cross-linguistic Comparison Authors: Filiaci, Francesca Abstract: This thesis focuses on the cross-linguistic differences between Italian and Spanish regarding the pragmatic restrictions on the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns (NS and OSP). It also tries to identify possible links between such cross-linguistic differences and morpho-syntactic differences at the level of the verbal morphology of the two languages. Spanish and Italian are typologically related and morpho-syntactically similar and have been assumed to instantiate the same setting of the NS parameter with respect to not only its syntactic licensing conditions, but also the pragmatic constraints determining the distribution of null and overt subject pronouns, and this assumption has had important implications for cross-linguistic research. The first aim of this study was to test directly for the first time the assumption about the equivalence of Italian and Spanish; in order to do so, I run a series of self-paced reading experiments using the same materials translated in each language, so that the results were directly comparable. The experiments were based on Carminati’s (2002) study on antecedent preferences for Italian NSs and OSPs in intra-sentential anaphora, testing the Position of Antecedent Strategy. The results suggest that while in Italian there is a strict division of labour between NS and OSP (confirming Carminati’s findings), this division is not as clear-cut in Spanish. More precisely, while Italian personal pronouns unambiguously signal a switch in subject reference, the association between OSPs and switch reference seems to be much weaker in Spanish. These results, which are interpreted in terms of Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) cross-linguistic typology of deficient pronouns, highlight an asymmetry between the strength of NS and OSP biases in Spanish that could not have emerged through the traditional methodology used by the numerous variationist studies on the subject, based on corpus analysis. A subsequent pair of experiments tested the hypothesis that the cross-linguistic differences attested might be related to the relative syncretism of the Spanish verbal morphology compared to the Italian one with regard to the unambiguous expression of person features on the verbal head. The results only provided weak support for the hypothesis, although they did confirm the presence of the cross- linguistic differences in the processing and resolution of anaphoric NS and OSP dependencies revealed by the previous experiments. Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6510 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z