San Francisco Chinatown: Transnationalism, identity construction, and heritage language maintenance

Sino-Amerikaner sind eine sichtbare Minderheit in San Francisco und tragen merklich zur kulturellen und sprachlichen Zusammensetzung der Stadt bei. Seit der Ankunft der ersten chinesischen Immigranten Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, befindet sich Chinatown in einer zentralen Lage in San Francisco und kann auch heute noch als "ethnische Enklave" bezeichnet werden. Zahlreiche Institutionen und Organisation sind auf die Bedürfnisse der community ausgerichtet und fördern das Fortbestehen der chinesischen Kultur in der Stadt. Sprachlich zeigt Chinatown eine grosse Vielfalt mit Kantonesisch als dominanter chinesischer Sprache und mit Englisch als Sprache des sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Aufstiegs. Dieser Artikel befasst sich mit der Auswirkung von Transnationalismus auf Sprachwahl und Identität (cf. Vertovec 1999, 2001) und beleuchtet, wie sich verschiedene Einwanderergenerationen in Bezug auf transnationale Beziehungen sowie Beziehungen mit der Mehrheitsgesellschaft unterscheiden. Basierend auf dieser Diskussion wird hinterfragt, wie sich Globalisierung und der Aufstieg Chinas auf den "Sprachenmarkt" (Bourdieu 1979; Blommaert 2010) in San Francisco und auf Entscheidungen bezüglich Spracherhalt und Sprachwechsel auswirken

Identity in the London Indian diaspora: towards the quantification of qualitative data

For second-generation members of a diaspora community, ethnic and cultural affiliation are less straightforward than for the first generation. We compare information on identity construction in London's Indian Diaspora with the participants’ linguistic integration into the host community. Our study is novel and exploratory in that it combines quantitative, variationist methodology with a qualitative approach. We employ two standard sociolinguistic instruments to model subjects’ ethnic identity: a questionnaire and sociolinguistic interviews with a focus on discursive identity construction. In a second step we investigate possible connections between morphosyntactic variation and ethnic identity in language use data from three different communicative contexts. The results show that, while interview data on ethnic identity are amenable to quantification, clear correlations between the resulting identity scores and vernacular morphosyntactic features are difficult to find. In particular, patterns of style-shifting between the different communicative contexts are not as expected

日本の大学における英語アカデミックライティング教育の可能性と課題

Today, whether English's dominance as a global lingua franca benefits higher education, more and more universities around the world have made efforts to integrate English academic writing education into their institutional policies and strategies. This trend has been observed particularly against the background where, with the increased internationalization of higher education, the imperative for universities globally to focus on maintaining or improving their international reputation and rankings has grown significantly. Indeed, such prestige tends to be assessed largely in terms of publications in English. With this in mind, we are concerned with how higher education institutions address these efforts toward promoting English academic writing in a specific non-English L1 context, namely Japan. English academic writing in university contexts where English is an additional language exists where the fields of language education, higher education administration, research methodology, and cultural socialization converge. Therefore, this volume brings together scholarship that aims to examine the different ways in which academic writing education shapes and is shaped by students, faculty and other stakeholders in Japanese universities. This volume’s eight chapters, by authors with diverse backgrounds, ranging from administrators to researchers, and from humanities and social sciences to medical studies, explore the opportunities and challenges of English academic writing education in Japanese universities by looking at related topics, including writing centers, faculty members, genre-specific education, and technology development. Together, the discussions in the individual chapters can contribute profoundly to theory, policy, and practice in the domains of curriculum, research, and administration in university contexts.Introduction… Norifumi Miyokawa 1 Part I: A writing center in Japan: Hiroshima University Chapter One: Development of the Hiroshima University Writing Center －From an administrative perspective－… Hiroko Araki & Norifumi Miyokawa 3 Chapter Two: Perceptions of academic writing support －A needs analysis of the Hiroshima University Writing Center－… Roehl Sybing & Norifumi Miyokawa 17 Part II: Faculty development for academic writing Chapter Three: Potential roles of writing centers for writing related Faculty Development… Machi Sato & Shinichi Cho 31 Chapter Four: Academic writing support for faculty members －Writing Groups and Writing Retreats－… Adina Staicov 45 Part III: Genre-specific education: Cases in the medical field Chapter Five: How to write the Introduction of biomedical research articles －Move analysis of the first and last sentences－… Takeshi Kawamoto & Tatsuya Ishii 57 Chapter Six: Error analysis of overt lexicogrammatical errors in the prepublication English-language manuscripts of Japanese biomedical researchers －With implications for the teaching of writing for biomedical research –… Flaminia Miyamasu 67 Part IV: Theoretical and practical approaches to academic writing Chapter Seven: Language socialization and writing centers… Akiko Katayama 81 Chapter Eight: Socialization into integrity －Using plagiarism software to teach L2 writing－… Gavin Furukawa 95 Acknowledgements… Norifumi Miyokawa 10

A blend of MaLT: Selected contributions from the Methods and Linguistic Theories Symposium 2015

Over the past few decades, linguistic theorizing has benefited from an increasing trend towards empirical methodologies across all disciplines. Methodological know-how – both productive and receptive – has thus become one of the key qualifications for researchers. The empirical turn in linguistics has gone hand in hand with a considerable diversification of research methods. This diversity, which has come to be seen as a strength of linguistics as a field, has also benefited linguistic theory building. The present volume contains selected contributions from the 2015 Methods and Linguistic Theories (MaLT) symposium that address the aforementioned issues from an empirical and/or theoretical perspective. They can be seen as the essence of what MaLT was about, and illustrate the range of topics covered as well as the various concerns and approaches that featured during the event

Creating belonging in San Francisco Chinatown's diasporic community : morphosyntactic aspects of indexing ethnic identity

This book presents a much-needed discussion on ethnic identification and morphosyntactic variation in San Francisco Chinatown—a community that has received very little attention in linguistic research. An investigation of original, interactive speech data sheds light on how first- and second-generation Chinese Americans signal (ethnic) identity through morphosyntactic variation in English and on how they co-construct identity discursively. After an introduction to the community’s history, the book provides background information on ethnic varieties in North America. This discussion grounds the present book within existing research and illustrates how studies on ethnic varieties of English have evolved. The book then proceeds with a description of quantitative and qualitative results on linguistic variation and ethnic identity. These analyses show how linguistic variation is only one way of signalling belonging to a community and highlight that Chinese Americans draw on a variety of sources, most notably the heritage language, to construct and negotiate (ethnic) identity. This book will be of particular interest to linguists - particularly academics working in sociolinguistics, language and identity, and language variation - but also to scholars interested in related issues such as migration, discrimination, and ethnicity