Who and What Is the Field of Applied Linguistics Overlooking?: Why This Matters and How Educational Linguistics Can Help

Thousands of individuals in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere are currently endeavoring to learn highly endangered, Indigenous languages, most laboring under conditions that are radically different from the majority of world language learners. These learning contexts are defined not only by shortages of materials, limited domains of use, few proficient speakers, and wide dialectal variation, but by histories of colonialism, racism, and oppression. To date, there has been relatively limited interaction between applied linguistics scholarship on language learning on the one hand, and Indigenous language education on the other. Concomitantly, despite massive worldwide demographic shifts of recent decades, applied linguists still know relatively little about simultaneous additional language and initial literacy learning among students with interrupted or limited formal schooling. Yet, these students are among the fastest growing populations in many U.S. districts and elsewhere. Drawing on the roots and four decades of scholarship in Educational Linguistics as a field, and five years of studies in Minnesota (home to thousands of Ojibwe and ten of thousands of Somali youth), this presentation argues that deep consideration of contexts and learners such as these is productive for the development of a robust field of second language acquisition and applied linguistics more broadly

Language Revitalisation in the Andes: Can the Schools Reverse Language Shift?

Quechua, often known as the language of the Incas, remains today a vital language with over 10 million speakers in several Andean republics. Nevertheless, census records and sociolinguistic studies document a continuous cross-generational shift from Quechua monolingualism to Spanish monolingualism in the latter half of the twentieth century, at both individual and community levels. An increasing awareness of the potential threat to the language has led to a variety of new initiatives for Quechua revitalization in the 1990s, initiatives which go beyond earlier experimental bilingual education projects designed primarily to provide mother tongue literacy instruction to indigenous children (in transitional or maintenance programs) to larger or more rooted efforts to extend indigenous language and literacy instruction to new speakers as well. Drawing on documents, interviews, and on-site participant observation, this paper will review and comment on two recent such initiatives: Bolivia’s 1994 national educational reform incorporating the provision of bilingual intercultural education on a national scale; and a community-based effort to incorporate Quichua as a second language instruction in a school of the Ecuadorian highlands

Bilingüismo aditivo por meio de política lingüística da família: estratégias, identidades e resultados interacionais

This paper summarizes data from two case studies of how two families enact language policies with the goal of cultivating early and additive bilingualism. The focus is on primary caretakers’ everyday speech and their interactional strategies. Our aim is to provide insight and additional descriptive data concerning how family language policies are established, enacted, and negotiated in the home. The findings suggest that caretaker status (mother vs. nanny) plays a role in quantity of speech, but not necessarily in the complexity of that speech. All primary caretakers (that is, both mothers and nannies) tended to stick with their stated language policy and to avoid English; in contrast, children frequently used English in interactions with caretakers. In response to children’s non-target language use, all caretakers were most likely to ‘moveon’ and to continue the conversation in the target language. However, mothers were found to be more likely than nannies to expand on and incorporate the child’s non-target language utterance into their own turn. Nannies, in contrast, were more likely to engage in explicit teaching or prompting. The findings are discussed in terms of child learning opportunities but also with an eye to how caretakers’ language use patterns are linked to their identities within the family. Key words: bilingualism, language policy, child second language acquisition.Este artigo apresenta dados de dois estudos de caso a respeito de como duas famílias praticam política lingüística com o objetivo de promover bilingüismo precoce e aditivo. O foco recai sobre a fala diária de cuidadores principais e suas estratégias interacionais. Nosso objetivo é oferecer insight e dados descritivos adicionais sobre como políticas lingüísticas familiares são estabelecidas, postas em prática e negociadas no ambiente familiar. Os resultados sugerem que o status da cuidadora (mãe versus babá) tem um papel importante na quantidade de fala, mas não necessariamente sobre a complexidade dessa fala. Todas as cuidadoras primárias (ou seja, ambas as mães e as babás) mantiveram-se fiéis a política lingüística abertamente estabelecida na família e evitaram usar inglês; em contraste, as crianças freqüentemente usaram inglês em suas interações com as cuidadoras. Em resposta ao não uso da língua alvo pelas crianças, o mais provável era que todas as cuidadoras continuavam a conversa na língua alvo. Contudo, as mães mais do que as babás expandiam e incorporavam o enunciado da criança não produzido na língua alvo em seus próprios turnos de fala. As babás, em contraste, tendiam a se engajar em ensino explícito ou prompting (no sentido de induzir a criança a falar). Esses resultados são discutidos em termos das oportunidades de aprender que a criança tem, mas também em termos de como os padrões de uso da linguagem pelas cuidadoras estava ligado a suas identidades dentro da família. Palavras-chave: bilingüismo, política lingüística, aquisição de segunda língua pela criança

Authenticity and Unification in Quechua Language Planning

With more than ten million speakers and numerous local and regional varieties, the unification and standardization of Quechua/Quichua has been a complicated, politically charged, and lengthy process. In most Andean nations, great strides have been made towards unification of the language in recent decades. However, the process is far from complete, and multiple unresolved issues remain, at both national and local levels. A frequent sticking point in the process is the concern that the authenticity of the language will be lost in the move towards unification. This paper examines the potentially problematic tension between the goals of authenticity and unification. One case examines an orthographic debate which arose in the process of establishing an official orthography for Quechua at the national level in Peru. The second case study moves to the local level and concerns two indigenous communities in Saraguro in the southern Ecuadorian highlands where Spanish predominates but two Quichua varieties co-exist. The final section considers the implications of these debates and tensions for language planning and policy

Additive bilingualism through family language policy: Strategies, identities and interactional outcomes

This paper summarizes data from two case studies of how two families enact language policies with the goal of cultivating early and additive bilingualism. The focus is on primary caretakers’ everyday speech and their interactional strategies. Our aim is to provide insight and additional descriptive data concerning how family language policies are established, enacted, and negotiated in the home. The findings suggest that caretaker status (mother vs. nanny) plays a role in quantity of speech, but not necessarily in the complexity of that speech. All primary caretakers (that is, both mothers and nannies) tended to stick with their stated language policy and to avoid English; in contrast, children frequently used English in interactions with caretakers. In response to children’s non-target language use, all caretakers were most likely to ‘moveon’ and to continue the conversation in the target language. However, mothers were found to be more likely than nannies to expand on and incorporate the child’s non-target language utterance into their own turn. Nannies, in contrast, were more likely to engage in explicit teaching or prompting. The findings are discussed in terms of child learning opportunities but also with an eye to how caretakers’ language use patterns are linked to their identities within the family. Key words: bilingualism, language policy, child second language acquisition

An asymptotic theory for the propagation of a surface-catalysed flame in a tube

Experiments have shown that when a mixture of fuel and oxygen is passed through a zirconia tube whose inner surface is coated with a catalyst, and then ignited at the end of the tube, a reaction front, or flame, propagates back along the tube towards the fuel inlet. The reaction front is visible as a red hot region moving at a speed of a few millimetres per second. In this paper we study a model of the flow, which takes into account diffusion, advection and chemical reaction at the inner surface of the tube. By assuming that the flame propagates at a constant speed without change of form, we can formulate a steady problem in a frame of reference moving with the reaction front. This is solved using the method of matched asymptotic expansions, assuming that the Reynolds and Damköhler numbers are large. We present numerical and, where possible, analytical results, first when the change in fluid density is small (a simplistic but informative limit) and secondly in the variable-density case. The speed of the travelling wave decreases as the critical temperature of the surface reaction increases and as the mass flow rate of fuel increases. We also make a comparison between our results and some preliminary experiments