Intonation,identity and contact‐induced change among Polish‐speaking migrants in the U.K.

This article examines intonational variation in a language contact situation. The study contributes to sociolinguistic research on the social meaning of intonational variation (Podesva 2006 ; Levon 2014 ). Intonation is studied in a multilingual context of global mobility: within a group of Polish‐speaking migrants in Britain who, thanks to cheap transportation and new channels of communication, could make use of linguistic resources unlimited by territorial boundaries from the beginning of their transnational experience. The study shows that speakers with seemingly similar linguistic and cultural profiles make use of intonation patterns in different ways in the context of the narrative of the self: speakers oriented towards the global economy and the English‐speaking world incorporate a mainly English intonational pattern, the fall‐rise, with increased frequency to do interactional work that it does in English, while other groups maintain Standard Polish norms. As shown, intonational variation participates in the creation of fluid identities that blur linguistic and sociocultural boundaries.     

Young People of Migrant Origin in Sweden

This article surveys immigration during the second part of the twentieth century with the aim of determining the origins of the immigrant population and the socioeconomic position of the second generation. It focuses on migration from Turkey from the 1960s onward. Originally, migration from Turkey was within the framework of labor recruitment. These migrants were predominantly ethnic Turks of rural origin. A second wave of migrants from Turkey was composed of Syriani/Assyrians, a Christian minority from eastern Turkey seeking asylum in the 1970s on the grounds of religious persecution. Since the 1980s, the main intake of migrants from Turkey has been Kurds seeking protection on the grounds of political persecution. Immigration of ethnic Turks and Syriani/Assyrians is restricted to family reunification and family formation; the numbers are low. Kurds, on the other hand, are accepted both on the grounds of refugee claims and family reunification/family formation. The article looks at conditions of growing up in Sweden, with a particular focus on education, mother‐tongue classes and instruction in Swedish. Second‐generation youth distinguish themselves by an overrepresentation among dropouts from school, but also by an overrepresentation among those who do well academically in comparison with native Swedes. This applies to second‐generation youth with family roots in Turkey. Though very few under the age of 18 hold regular employment, the article also discusses the prospects of entering the labor market, based on information from the regular labor market surveys. Unemployment rates are consistently higher for second‐generation migrants than for native‐born Swedish youth. The article closes with a discussion about the developing multicultural society in Sweden and the niches that second‐generation youth tend to occupy.     

Sensing the Bike: Creating a Collaborative Understanding of a Multi‐Sensorial Experience in MotoGP Racing

This article concerns the analysis of work interaction of a motorcycle racing team during pre‐season tests, drawing on ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis to explicate the ways in which the manager and the driver collaborate, through everyday gestures and language, to create a shared understanding of the bike's mechanical issues and disambiguate the driver's accounts of the bike's performance. We report on a set of video‐recorded encounters between the manger and the driver, examining how the multi‐sensorial experience of the driver is recollected and understood by team members, while overcoming interactional constraints imposed by the unique professional setting.     

Legitimating the Philippines as a language learning space: Transnational Korean youth's experiences and evaluations

This paper examines how a peripheral English‐speaking country is constructed as a legitimate language learning space in the global English language teaching (ELT) industry by investigating South Koreans’ recent engagement in Philippine English education. It focuses on a short‐term English study abroad program, in which the Philippines serves as a transit place prior to students’ moving to a Western English‐speaking country. Drawing data from ethnographic research on South Korean youth studying English abroad, the article analyzes why Korean students seek Philippine English education in spite of their apparent pursuit of authentic English, and how they evaluate their learning experience in the Philippines. This paper finds that the Philippines holds a niche market in the global ELT industry by separating a space for English learning from other public and everyday spaces of English use and offering pedagogically intensive but emotionally supportive environments to English learners.     

From sociolinguistic variation to socially strategic stylisation1

This article investigates the indexical relation between language, interactional stance and social class. Quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of a linguistic variable (the first person possessive singular) is combined with interactional analysis of the way one particular variant (possessive ‘me’, as in Me pencil's up me jumper) is used by speakers in ‘stylised’ interactional performances. The aim of this analysis is to explore: (1) how possessive ‘me’ is implicated in the construction and management of local identities and relationships; and (2) how macro‐social categories, such as social class, relate to linguistic choice. The data for this analysis comes from an ethnographic study of the language practices of nine‐ to ten‐year‐old children in two socially‐differentiated primary schools in north‐east England. A secondary aim of the article is to spotlight the sociolinguistic sophistication of these young children, in particular, the working‐class participants, who challenge the notion that the speech of working‐class children is in any way ‘impoverished’.     

Teaching minority students within minority schools: teachers’ conceptions of multicultural education in Swedish‐speaking schools in Finland

Finland is experiencing increased cultural diversity due to immigration and is facing challenges in developing multicultural education (ME) in schools. There is a Swedish‐speaking minority in Finland, and immigrant students entering Swedish‐speaking schools hence become a minority within a minority. In this study, using open‐ended interviews, we explore the views of Swedish‐speaking teachers of ‘minority within a minority students’ and of ME. We found that Swedish‐speaking teachers have a positive attitude towards cultural diversity. On the other hand, they consider teaching to be independent of culture and take a colour‐blind approach to their work. Being minority language speakers themselves does not necessarily affect their views and understanding of immigrant students.     

Towards a Sociocultural Perspective on Identity Formation in Education

This article discusses a sociocultural approach to processes of identity that has implications for how we understand learning and identity formation in education. Focusing on the socially constructed and culturally figured nature of language, tools, and interactions in learning contexts, this approach assists in the appreciation of how students navigate through and develop an understanding of themselves in different educational contexts. To this end, reference is made to Wortham's work on interactional positioning in narratives and the work of Holland and colleagues on figured worlds. Wortham provides the tools for a systematic analysis of how individuals construct their identities by positioning themselves in discursive interaction. Holland and colleagues alert us to the cultural shaping of such positioning in cultural worlds and the artifacts mediating identity formation. To explore the potential of combining these lenses, a case study is described involving a series of interviews with medical students about their self-perceptions in two contexts of clinical training. The case study highlights how different worlds and identities are formed in these educational contexts.     

Infant‐Directed Prosody Helps Infants Map Sounds to Meanings

Adults typically use an exaggerated, distinctive speaking style when addressing infants. However, the effects of infant‐directed (ID) speech on infants' learning are not yet well understood. This research investigates how ID speech affects how infants perform a key function in language acquisition, associating the sounds of words with their meanings. Seventeen‐month‐old infants were presented with two label‐object pairs in a habituation‐based word learning task. In Experiment 1, the labels were produced in adult‐directed (AD) speech. In Experiment 2, the labels were produced in ID prosody; they had higher pitch, greater pitch variation, and longer durations than the AD labels. We found that infants failed to learn the labels in AD speech, but succeeded in learning the same labels when they were produced in ID speech. Experiment 3 investigated the role of variability in learning from ID speech. When the labels were presented in ID prosody with no variation across tokens, infants failed to learn them. Our findings indicate that ID prosody can affect how readily infants map sounds to meanings and that the variability in prosody that is characteristic of ID speech may play a key role in its effect on learning new words.     

Doing Testing: How Concrete Competence can Facilitate or Inhibit Performances of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This article contributes to the sociology of science and technology through the study of language use and social interaction. As an analysis of how clinicians examine children to diagnose developmental disabilities, it involves the sociology of testing and standardization, with our particular focus on Autism Spectrum Disorders. Whereas previous research has concentrated primarily on the outcomes of testing, such as diagnostic trends, little has been written about the tests by which these trends are produced. Our analysis shows how psychometric tests operate to shape the interactive environments (those established by the test instrument, scoring metrics, etc.). Additionally, the interactional environment (the practices by which protocols are implemented as clinician and child do the test) exerts an influence on performance. In short, the interactive and interactional environment may affect the measurement of ability and difference in children. We propose that the emphasis of clinical tests on measuring second-order, abstract competence—or the ability to produce general answers to theoretical questions—may obscure various kinds of first-order, concrete competence and “autistic intelligence” a child displays. As forms of first-order, concrete competence, we examine orientation in situ to testing history, narrative combinations of test items, and using filler words for test item answers.     

Deserving citizenship? Exploring migrants' experiences of the ‘citizenship test’ process in the United Kingdom

Since the early 2000s several European countries have introduced language and citizenship tests as new requirements for access to long‐term residence or naturalization. The content of citizenship tests has been often presented as exclusionary in nature, in particular as it is based on the idea that access to citizenship has to be ‘deserved’. In this paper, we aim to explore the citizenship tests ‘from below’, through the focus on the experience of migrants who prepare and take the ‘Life in the UK’ test, and with particular reference to how they relate to the idea of ‘deservingness’. Through a set of in‐depth interviews with migrants in two different cities (Leicester and London), we show that many of them use narratives in which they distinguish between the ‘deserving citizens’ and the ‘undeserving Others’ when they reflect upon their experience of becoming citizens. In so doing, they negotiate new hierarchies of inclusion into and exclusion from citizenship, which reflect broader neo‐liberal and ethos‐based conceptions of citizenship.     

Migrant family visits and the life course: interrelationships between age,capacity and desire

Migrant visits to the country of origin play a crucial role in transnational family cohesion and migrant well‐being; the research on them so far has focused primarily on the relationship between migrant integration and transnational engagement. In this article, I extend the discussion by adding a life course perspective to Carling and Hoelscher's (2013) framework for studying transnational activities, which incorporates capacity and desire. I explore whether age has an independent effect on migrants' family visits and how it relates to socio‐economic resources, migration status and transnational ties. Using data from a survey of Peruvian migrants around the globe (n=7,741), I show that migrants' stage in the life course has a partial effect on their propensity to travel through the interrelationship between age, capacity and desire. The findings show that the capacity and desire of migrants to visit their country of origin are particularly strong after reaching retirement age, suggesting a favourable combination of resources at later stages in life. However, whether this expresses a positive approach to ageing, or is a strategy to balance transnational family obligations and to postpone return decisions, remains open for future research.     

From Sin to Sick: Digital Judaism and Pornography

This article explores how a Jewish religious website dedicated to solving pornography addiction negotiates religion/tradition and science/technological modernity. Further, the article discusses how medicalization of sexuality is used to resolve inherent tensions in the practice of digital usage. Medicalization language transforms the GuardYourEyes.com website from a forbidden medium for ultra-Orthodox members into a clinical space, a tool for healing. Furthermore, medicalization language allows religious digital prosumers to speak freely about sexuality. By framing sexuality as a “problem of truth” (Foucault, 1998), the ultra-Orthodox authors of GuardYourEyes.com can speak about sex, without being guilty of breaking the admonition that forbids speaking about sex. However, this open discussion serves as a tool to discipline and regulate sexual behavior, thus maintaining the accepted community norms, albeit in a way that is revolutionary for this community. Furthermore, by supporting religious language with medical language, religion and science blur in a way that could potentially undermine both.     

Barreras del Lenguaje: Children's Negotiation of Adult‐Created Exclusionary Practices*

This article explores the effects of language differences on dynamics among youth athletes. Fifteen hours of participant observation were conducted with a youth soccer team, supplemented by five interviews with the coach and with players’ parents. With a cohort consisting of a Spanish‐ and English‐speaking bilingual coach, one fully bilingual player and another partly bilingual player, two Spanish‐only‐speaking players, and four English‐only‐speaking players, there were opportunities for many different types of interactions. This article specifically focuses on how language differences served as a catalyst for the creation of exclusionary practices by the adults surrounding the team. However, these practices did not determine the team's culture; rather, there was both accommodation and resistance on the part of the players to those practices of exclusion that the adults had introduced.     

Leveraging symbolic capital: the use of blat networks across transnational spaces

In this article, we contribute to debates on how social networks sustain migrants' entrepreneurial activities. By reporting on 31 interviews with Eastern European migrants in the UK, we provide a critical lens on the tendency to assume that migrants have ready‐made social networks in the host country embedded in co‐ethnic communities. We extend this limited perspective by demonstrating how Eastern European migrants working in the UK transform blat social networks, formulated in the cultural and political contours of Soviet society, in their everyday lived experiences. Our findings highlight not only the monetarization of such networks but also the continuing embedded nature of trust existing within these networks, which cut across transnational spaces. We show how forms of social capital based on Russian language use and legacies of a shared Soviet past, are just as important as the role of ‘co‐ethnics’ and ‘co‐migrants’ in facilitating business development. In doing so, we present a more nuanced understanding of the role that symbolic capital plays in migrant entrepreneurial journeys and its multifaceted nature.     

Mother Tongue,Host Country Earnings,and Return Migration: Evidence from Cross‐National Administrative Records

Using a unique database constructed through the merging of administrative records from Sweden and Finland, we provide the first detailed examination of differential return migration risks by people's mother tongue within a given nationality. We analyze whether the divergence in return migration risk between Swedish‐speaking and Finnish‐speaking Finns in Sweden relates to host country earnings, considering that the former group are in parity with native Swedes. Host country earnings and other background variables are found to explain only a modest part of the difference in return migration risk. Variation in the return migration risk of labor migrants is consequently not solely a result of earnings differentials.     

Developing a Syllabus for a Mixed‐Methods Research Course

In this paper, the author shares with readers his journey towards creating and evaluating a mixed‐methods research course in education using a course design framework to guide the discussion. He discusses important questions such as what goes into a mixed‐methods syllabus, what resources are available to instructors and students, what learning goals we might set for our students and how we might assess whether students achieve these goals in the context of teaching his own course for the first time. There is a need for dialogue among the ‘first generation’ of instructors of mixed‐methods research courses about how we teach these courses – readers are encouraged to continue this dialogue about teaching mixed‐methods research courses by following up on and extending the ideas in this paper.     

Migrants' minority‐language newspeakerism: The pervasiveness of nation‐state monolingual regimes in transnational contexts

From a critical sociolinguistics perspective, this paper investigates processes of minority‐language newspeakerism among 23 migrants from heterogeneous socioeconomic and language backgrounds. Informants networked in a cybercafé and a bench in Catalonia, a European society with a majority and a minority language, Spanish and Catalan. Drawing on audio‐recorded interviews, naturally‐occurring interactions and four‐year ethnographic data, I analyze how informants' language practices and ideologies interplay with self‐/other‐ascribed Catalan newspeakerhood. The results show that migrants do not envision themselves as Catalan newspeakers. They employ ethnicist constructions of Catalan as ‘the locals’’ language, and inhabit fluid identities whereby ‘Catalanness’ is vindicated through global Spanish. They invest in Spanish newspeakerhood instead, presenting Spanish as the language of ‘integration’. I conclude that newspeakerism contributes to understanding migrants’ roles in the linguistic conflicts of minority‐language societies; particularly, the ways in which they invest in majority languages, following nation‐state monolingual regimes which pervade as gatekeepers to post‐national citizenship.     

The Interactional Community: Emergent Fields of Collective Agency*

Social interaction is generally regarded as elemental to the notion of community. Within the broader discourse on community, the field‐interactional perspective is distinctive in its explicit focus on emergent social processes and community change dynamics. Wilkinson (1970) extended Kaufman’s (1959) early work on the interactional approach through an application of the social field concept to community action. In doing so, Wilkinson (1991) outlined several key linkages between social–symbolic interaction and community agency. Despite these promising beginnings, only a modicum of research has examined the theoretical or philosophical underpinnings of the interactional conception of community. This article explores the symbolic‐interactionist tenets undergirding the field‐interactional approach, most notably Mead’s (1934, 1938) discussion of generalized social attitudes and Blumer’s (1969a, 1969b) work on joint or collective action.     

Language attitudes in interaction1

This paper discusses the observation of language attitudes in interaction and argues that these approaches provide invaluable insights for the study of language attitudes. In the first half of the paper, the three different kinds of discourse‐based methods of analysis that scholars have used to analyse language attitudes (content‐based approaches, turn‐internal semantic and pragmatic approaches, and interactional approaches) are discussed. In the second half, then, the third of these approaches is used to illustrate such an analysis with four stretches of conversation in different contexts. In the end, the argument is put forward that discourse‐based approaches in general and interactional approaches in particular should be viewed as at least as fundamental to language attitude research as more commonly used quantitative methods of analysis, since the former can provide the researcher with insights that the latter do not.