Young Adult Literature in the Classroom: A Tool to Inspire Students and Encourage Reading Both Inside and Outside of the Classroom

This paper examines the potential of incorporating more young adult literature into high school English and language arts classrooms. Drawing on past research of others and the thoughts and opinions of a handful of current high school students, this paper will focus on what young adult literature is, why more teens and young adults should read it, and how it can be incorporated and taught in the average high school English classroom. These studies, along with the thoughts and experiences provided by high school students surveyed for this paper, may not reflect the thoughts and opinions of every high school student taking part in their English classes, but they do provide valuable insight that current and future educators should take into consideration when entering their own classroom

Documenting variation in (endangered) heritage languages: how and why?

This paper contributes to recently expanded interest in documenting variable as well as categorical patterns of endangered languages. It describes approaches, tools and curricular developments that have benefitted from involving students who are heritage language community members, key to expanding variationist focus to a wider range of languages. I describe aspects of the Heritage Language Variation and Change Project in Toronto, contrasting a “truly” endangered language to a less clearly endangered language. Faetar, with <700 homeland speakers (in Italy) and some 200 in Toronto, and no transmission to a third generation in Toronto, is endangered by any definition. Heritage Italian, in contrast, is a diasporic variety related to a robust homeland variety as well as the mother tongue of 166,000 Torontonians. However, reports of strong English influence on the language and transmission statistics both suggest that it too is endangered in Toronto. Homeland and Heritage patterns are compared to better understand the processes of language variation and change in lesser-studied varieties, with a focus on null subject patterns. Analysis of the more endangered language helps interpret otherwise ambiguous patterns in the less endangered language. Results indicate that neither heritage language exhibits the simplification anticipated for small languages in contact with a majority language.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Cross-Cultural Approaches: Comparing Heritage Languages in Toronto

Comparable documentation across language varieties can contribute to linguistic knowledge, e.g., what types of structures and patterns are cross-linguistically possible? common? Such analyses also provide a proving ground on which to test which theoretical principles of sociolinguistics are universal. To begin to tackle the complex issue of how we might develop a framework for cross-cultural sociolinguistics, I share some insights from comparative analysis of several languages that are spoken in one city but that have not been subjected to much sociolinguistic analysis. The languages in question (Cantonese, Faetar, Korean, Italian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and Hungarian) are heritage languages spoken in Toronto for 50-100+ years and subjected to variationist scrutiny since 2009. Comparative analyses of homeland and heritage patterns across several heritage languages are compared to better understand the processes of language variation and change in this set of lesser-studied varieties. I highlight trends observed in seven years of ongoing study of Toronto’s heritage languages that may help us understand contact-induced change in this context at the community, generation, and individual level. Comparisons reveal surprising discrepancies between reports of linguistic attitudes and language use and evidence of ongoing change. The most surprising trend is the lack of correlation between usage patterns and attitudes to linguistic innovation. Such issues must be understood if we are to develop a framework for cross-cultural comparisons

Stable Variation vs. Language Change and the Factors that Constrain Them

To better diagnose language change vs. stable variation, we must clarify their differences – a critical endeavor especially for variables that may change very slowly over long time periods, where an Apparent Time approach may not reveal clues to change in progress. Wallenberg and Fruehwald (2013) propose the Continuity Hypothesis: that stable variables should be constrained by at least one continuous factor; we provide a stringent test of this hypothesis, analyzing 38 dependent variables from articles published in Language Variation and Change. Of the 23 ‘changing’ variables analyzed, none was reported to be constrained by continuous factors; of the 8 ‘stable’ variables analyzed, only one was found not to be associated with factors that could be treated as continuous. This significant distinction (Fisher’s Exact Test,

Sociophonetic Variation and Change in Heritage Languages: Lexical Effects in Heritage Italian Aspiration of Voiceless Stops

In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language's phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the frequency of lexical items. Our results show that sociophonetic aspiration resists lexicalization and applies to both frequent and infrequent words even in the speech of third-generation speakers. By contrast, the progressive introduction of contact-induced phonetic change is led by high-frequency words. These findings add to the complexity of heritage language phonology by suggesting that the pronunciation features of a heritage language can follow different fates depending on their sociolinguistic roles