The Emergence of Southern Dialectical Features in Native Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners in the American Deep South

It is generally assumed that students who study a target language in a particular country or region will gain the dialectical features of the place in which they had studied. While the current body of research generally supports this finding, dialectical adaptation to a specific area does not occur equally among all individuals, and studies that attempt to explain this resulting degree of dialectical adaptation based on individual and social factors is one that still needs greater attention. This investigation sought to examine the extent of dialectical adaptation to Southern American English (SAE) in six Spanish-speaking English Language Learners who were either pre-matriculated students who were taking intensive English language classes or matriculated students who were already taking regular university courses. Each individual’s degree of dialectical adaptation (phonology, lexicon, & morphosyntax) was scrutinized in terms of individual personality traits (by the Five Factor Model of Personality) and in terms of sociopsychological characteristics (by Schumann’s Model of Acculturation). Findings from the investigation demonstrated that dialectical adaptation to Southern American English by all participants was minimal, if not nonexistent. Even though that was the case, all of the participants demonstrated dialectical adaptation to standard American English through their use of colloquialisms found within the standard. In other words, the participants, consciously or unconsciously, did not assimilate factors of Southern American English and instead adopted features of the “standard” of American English. Posited explanations for these phenomena include hypercorrection via sociolinguistic pressure, dialectical levelling among the youth, and the critical period hypothesis. Within the investigation, the factors that were determined to be the most influential to one’s resulting degree of dialectical adaptation included the factors of v motivation, group cohesiveness, individual motivations/interests, and enclosure. In addition to these factors, the relationship between dialectical assimilation and the level of target language proficiency upon arrival to the host country was also shown to be impactful. Conclusions drawn from this study can be used to explain why some individuals who move to a foreign environment assimilate their new area’s linguistic patterns, as opposed to those who do not

Disinhibition in a CSCL Environment

Why do adults find it difficult to learn foreign languages? In the research literature, there are a number of hypotheses. Studies on the use of the Internet for learning, however, suggest that a hypothesis that has been largely ignored for the past two decades might have increased validity. The language ego permeability hypothesis argues that adults have difficulty learning foreign languages, because they are reluctant to give up control over selfpresentation. Giving up this control is necessary to learning a new language (Guiora, 1972). In this paper, we present empirical data from two studies that confirm the findings of other researchers in this field, and support the language ego permeability hypothesis. Both of these studies involved students conversing in IRC Franais, a textbased chat environment for language learning. We observed that students in the text environment participate in class nearly an order of magnitude more often than they do with the same teacher in a face-to-face setting. This confirms work by Beauvois, Kelm, Kern and others. In a new analysis, we examine the nature of private communication in parallel to the public chat forum. The majority of these comments between students take place in the foreign language rather than the shared native language. We conclude with some suggestions of how the medium contributes to these changes and some implications of these findings for CSCL environments in other media and other domains