First language

About: First language is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 23974 publications have been published within this topic receiving 544436 citations. The topic is also known as: arterial language & L1.

A First Language: The Early Stages

Abstract: For many years, Roger Brown and his colleagues have studied the developing language of pre-school children--the language that ultimately will permit them to understand themselves and the world around them. This longitudinal research project records the conversational performances of three children, studying both semantic and grammatical aspects of their language development. These core findings are related to recent work in psychology and linguistics--and especially to studies of the acquisition of languages other than English, including Finnish, German, Korean, and Samoan. Roger Brown has written the most exhaustive and searching analysis yet undertaken of the early stages of grammatical constructions and the meanings they convey. The five stages of linguistic development Brown establishes are measured not by chronological age-since children vary greatly in the speed at which their speech develops--but by mean length of utterance. This volume treats the first two stages. Stage I is the threshold of syntax, when children begin to combine words to make sentences. These sentences, Brown shows, are always limited to the same small set of semantic relations: nomination, recurrence, disappearance, attribution, possession, agency, and a few others. Stage II is concerned with the modulations of basic structural meanings--modulations for number, time, aspect, specificity--through the gradual acquisition of grammatical morphemes such as inflections, prepositions, articles, and case markers. Fourteen morphemes are studied in depth and it is shown that the order of their acquisition is almost identical across children and is predicted by their relative semantic and grammaticalcomplexity. It is, ultimately, the intent of this work to focus on the nature and development of knowledge: knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar; knowledge inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences.

Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning

Abstract: The term 'additive bilingualism' to refer to the situation where an individual's first language is a societally dominant and prestigious one. It has typically been associated with positive social and cognitive characteristics of bilinguals, while subtractive bilingualism has typically been associated with negative social and cognitive characteristics. This chapter considers certain linguistic outcomes of French immersion education in an attempt to show how truly 'additive' the program has been. It examines aspects of immersion student's first language performance that indicate an enhancement of linguistic skills over those of unilingual English students. Four different measures of French proficiency were calculated for such features as verb, prepositional, and syntactic accuracy, lexical diversity and lexical uniqueness, accent, fluency, and discourse and strategic performance. The opinion essay was scored for number of words written, non homophonous grammatical errors, and a global judgement of 'good' writing involving two dimensions: complexity of sentence structure and phrasing, and incidence of spelling, grammatical, and syntactic errors.

Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational Development of Bilingual Children

Abstract: The central thesis of this paper is that a cognitively and academically beneficial form of bilingualism can be achieved only on the basis of adequately developed first language (L1) skills. Two hypotheses are formulated and combined to arrive at this position. The “developmental interdependence” hypothesis proposes that the development of competence in a second language (L2) is partially a function of the type of competence already developed in L1 at the time when intensive exposure to L2 begins. The “threshold” hypothesis proposes that there may be threshold levels of linguistic competence which a bilingual child must attain both in order to avoid cognitive disadvantages and allow the potentially beneficial aspects of bilingualism to influence his cognitive and academic functioning. These hypotheses are integrated into a model of bilingual education in which educational outcomes are explained as a function of the interaction between background, child input and educational treatment factors. It is suggest...

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Abstract: Contents Preface to Fourth Edition Preface to Third Edition Preface to Second Edition Preface to First Edition Author's Acknowledgements Publisher's Acknowledgements 1. What do sociolinguists study? What is a sociolinguist? Why do we say the same thing in different ways? What are the different ways we say things? Social factors, dimensions and explanations Section I: Multilingual Speech Communities 2. Language choice in multilingual communities Choosing your variety or code Diglossia Code-switching or code-mixing 3. Language maintenance and shift Language shift in different communities Language death and language loss Factors contributing to language shift How can a minority language be maintained? Language revival 4. Linguistic varieties and multilingual nations Vernacular languages Standard languages Lingua francas Pidgins and creoles 5. National languages and language planning National and official languages Planning for a national official language Developing a standard variety in Norway The linguist's role in language planning Section II: Language Variation: Focus on Users 6. Regional and social dialects Regional variation Social variation Social dialects 7. Gender and age Gender-exclusive speech differences: non-Western communities Gender-preferential speech features: social dialect research Gender and social class Explanations of women's linguistic behaviour Age-graded features of speech Age and social dialect data Age grading and language change 8. Ethnicity and social networks Ethnicity Social networks 9. Language change Variation and change How do changes spread? How do we study language change? Reasons for language change Section III: Language Variation: Focus on Uses 10. Style, context and register Addressee as an influence on style Accommodation theory Context, style and class Style in non-Western societies Register 11. Speech functions, politeness and cross-cultural communication The functions of speech Politeness and address forms Linguistic politeness in different cultures 12. Gender, politeness and stereotypes Women's language and confidence Interaction Gossip The linguistic construction of gender The linguistic construction of sexuality Sexist language 13. Language, cognition and culture Language and perception Whorf Linguistic categories and culture Discourse patterns and culture Language, social class, and cognition 14. Analysing Discourse Pragmatics and politeness theory Ethnography of speaking Interactional sociolinguistics Conversation Analysis (CA) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) 15. Attitudes and applications Attitudes to language Sociolinguistics and education Sociolinguistics and forensic linguistics 16. Conclusion Sociolinguistic competence Dimensions of sociolinguistic analysis Sociolinguistic universals References Appendix: phonetic symbols Glossary Index

Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning*

Abstract: The author argues that second language acquisition (SLA) theorists have struggled to conceptualize the relationship between the language learner and the social world because they have not developed a comprehensive theory of social identity which integrates the language learner and the language learning context. She also maintains that SLA theorists have not adequately addressed how relations of power affect interaction between language learners and target language speakers. Using data collected in Canada from January to December 1991 from diaries, questionnaires, individual and group interviews, and home visits, the author illustrates how and under what conditions the immigrant women in her study created, responded to, and sometimes resisted opportunities to speak English. Drawing on her data analysis as well as her reading in social theory, the author argues that current conceptions of the individual in SLA theory need to be reconceptualized, and she draws on the poststructuralist conception of social identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change to explain the findings from her study. Further, she argues for a conception of investment rather than motivation to capture the complex relationship of language learners to the target language and their sometimes ambivalent desire to speak it. The notion of investment conceives of the language learner, not as a historical and unidimensional, but as having a complex social history and multiple desires. The article includes a discussion of the implications of the study for classroom teaching and current theories of communicative competence.