The foreign language and intercultural competence teacher: the acquisition of a new professional identity

It has now become commonplace to state that foreign language learning should be viewed in an intercultural perspective. The main objective of foreign language education is no longer defined strictly in terms of the acquisition of communicative competence. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence. The aim of the study reported on here was to investigate to what extent and in what way teachers' current professional profiles meet the specifications formulated in the theoretical literature regarding the ‘foreign language and intercultural competence teacher’. To answer this question, an international research design was developed, involving teachers from Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Mexico, Poland, Spain and Sweden. Our findings suggest that teachers' current foreign language‐and‐culture teaching profiles do not yet meet those of the envisaged ‘foreign language and intercultural competence teacher’, and that patterns in teacher thinking and teaching practice appear to exist within and across the participating countries.     

The vowel space as sociolinguistic sign

This paper examines variation in vowel space area and its use in social meaning making. Among adolescents at a California high school, patterns of difference in vowel space correlate to social practices of exclusion in the partying scene, albeit alongside explicit discourses of high school social life as inclusive and fluid. I treat vowel space as a sociolinguistic sign, that is, a holistic semiotic resource at play in addition to (or in tandem with) individual segments. Though the semiotic potential of a given linguistic sign is no doubt shaped by large-scale patterns of variation, the particular manifestations of meaning making are best viewed at the community level alongside other day-to-day practices. Further, I suggest that linguistic practices of difference and discourses of sameness are not contradictory, but instead a feature of the semiotic landscape. I thus interpret this vowel space variation as stylistically meaningful within the context of social actors’ ideological orientation to social life.     

The sociolinguistic development of Yiddish: Eighteenth to the twentieth centuries

Books reviewed in this article:
Estraikh, Gennady Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development
Kerler, Dov-Ber The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish
Peltz, Rakhmiel From Immigrant to Ethnic Culture: American Yiddish in South Philadelphia     

Fat talk: A citizen sociolinguistic approach

Fat talk, or self‐disparaging talk about the body, is common among US women and increasingly reported for men. Despite its commonality, this unique genre of talk is difficult to access using traditional sociolinguistic methods both because it is brief and because it arises spontaneously in casual conversation. Here we present a new method of data collection accomplished by collaborating with citizen sociolinguists to collect spontaneous fat talk in public spaces. We compare fat talk exchanges captured by citizen sociolinguists against those collected in a vignette‐based discourse completion task. Our results show redundancy both in how fat talk is initiated and in the manner of the reply across both forms of data collection. However, the citizen sociolinguistic method produced greater variety in fat talk utterances, was less methodologically taxing, and revealed that fat talk occurs differently in same‐sex interactions than mixed‐sex ones.     

Social class and psychotherapy: A sociolinguistic approach

Professional social workers are the primary resource for psychotherapeutic services among the lower status groups in our society. While everyone in the profession knows this, relatively little systematic research and theory has been generated on the question of how to adapt our interventions so as to better serve this clientele.Bernstein's work on social class and speech codes is examined. His theories are applied to the problem of conducting psychotherapy with a social stratum whose language code is ill-suited for the more traditional verbally oriented therapies. Some suggestions for alternative treatment approaches are made.     

Commodification of place,consumption of identity: The sociolinguistic construction of a ‘global village’ in rural China1

This paper seeks to contribute to the understanding of place as it relates to globalization and mobility by examining the sociolinguistic construction of a tourism site. A former residential neighborhood, West Street in Yangshuo County, China, was gradually transformed into a so‐called ‘global village’ for domestic tourists partly through appropriating English as one semiotic resource. Positioning this place in the global‐national‐local nexus, this study shows that the promotion of West Street as a ‘global village’ is not only driven by globalization or westernization, but more importantly capitalizes on English as a stylistic resource that indexes the modernist aspirations of the Chinese people. This commodified sense of place is nevertheless negotiated by tourists as they activate and (re‐)work the social meaning of place through their discursive practices. This highlights how place is a social construct, constantly transformed in the process of socio‐historical change, and also mediated by people's conceptualization, imagination and experience. 本文从社会语言学角度考察一处旅游景点的建构,旨在增进在全球化和流动时代背景下对‘地域’ (place) 的理解。位于中国阳朔县的西街,通过把英语作为一种符号资源,从一个历史居民街区转变成为所谓的‘地球村’。本研究从全球‐国家‐地方三位连结的框架审视该地域,说明‘地球村’不仅仅是全球化带动下的地方经济发展策略,更重要的是借用了在英语作为一种语言风格资源在中国社会中的作用。然而,这种构建的地域涵义也同时被游客通过不同方式激活和改写。本文提出,地域是社会构建的产物,其涵义随着社会历史的变革,人们对地域的理解,想象和体验,而不断改变。[Chinese]     

Properties of the sociolinguistic monitor1

This paper investigates the perceptual aspect of quantitative sociolinguistic variation in order to derive properties of a sociolinguistic monitor integrated into linguistic processing in real time. A series of experiments measured listeners’ sensitivity to frequencies in the form of variable percentages of the non‐standard apical form of the variable (ING). Subjects heard ten trial readings of broadcast news from the same speaker, and rated them on a seven‐point Likert scale of professional suitability. Responses conformed closely to a logarithmic function in which the effect of each deviation from the norm was proportional to the percent increase in deviations. The logarithmic pattern of responses was replicated in group and individual experiments in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and in group experiments in Columbia, South Carolina and Durham, New Hampshire. South Carolina subjects were less critical of the /in/ variant in news broadcasting but showed the identical logarithmic function in reacting to Northern and Southern speakers. Inferences are drawn on the window of temporal resolution of the sociolinguistic monitor, its sensitivity and the pattern of attenuation over time.     

Self‐presentation in sociolinguistic interviews: Identities and language variation in Panambi, Brazil

This paper contributes to recent work examining the role of identity, and in particular the uses of language for self‐presentation and the expression of individual identity, through the analysis of two sociolinguistic interviews from a community of German origin in southern Brazil. Drawing from a quantitative study of variation in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, we conducted a detailed analysis of the interviews of two women of different ages and social backgrounds. We first describe the social, cultural and historical context of the interviews, and then discuss how our two speakers use their linguistic resources to express varied, and at times conflicting, aspects of their identities. More specifically, we show how our participants seem to maintain certain in‐group, German‐linked features, yet also use out‐group or Brazilian features in order to index both the (local) German and (regional) Brazilian aspects of their identities. Our data and analysis highlight how participants' identity and language use patterns can be better understood through close analysis of the content of their discourse.     

Incorporating translation into sociolinguistic research: Translation policy in an international non‐governmental organisation

This article explores aspects of translation, multilingualism and language policy in the field of transnational civil society. By focusing on translation policies at Amnesty International, an international non‐governmental organisation that performs a key role in global governance, this article seeks to contribute to a globalisation‐sensitive sociolinguistics. It argues that combining a sociolinguistic approach – more precisely linguistic ethnography – with translation studies leads to an increased understanding of the language practices under study. Furthermore, the article calls for more interdisciplinary research, stating that there is space for sociolinguistics and translation studies to contribute to research in international relations and development studies by highlighting the role of multilingualism and challenging the traditionally powerful position of English in transnational civil society.     

Non‐understanding as a heuristic to hypothesizing cultural models: A meta‐oriented sociolinguistic strategy1

This article is concerned with the development of an analytic strategy to construct U.S. cultural models of war and terrorism, which are ‘mediatized’ or significantly shaped by the media. Central to that strategy are repair cues to non‐understanding as heuristics in intercultural encounters. These are applied to an inherently mediatized discursive ‘reality’ of war and terrorism. Theoretically, I synthesize sociolinguistic and anthropological perspectives into a ‘meta‐oriented sociolinguistics’, which analytically focuses on the meta‐dimension of discourse. The strategy is applied to a text on war and terrorism from the New York Times, to demonstrate its utility. Furthermore, I provide implications for enhancing validity in the ethnography of mediatized discourse. Specific to the findings of this article, I suggest that corpus studies of media discourse should be conducted on the metadiscursive keywords kamikaze, surprise attacks, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 in particular temporal frames.     

Patterns of sociolinguistic variation in teacher classroom speech

This study investigates sociolinguistic variation in teacher classroom speech. Based on a spoken‐French corpus produced by 59 teachers while teaching secondary school students (aged approximately 14–17 years) in four Ontario localities, it examines five cases of variant alternations. First, the study uses two comparative corpora to establish the social marking of the variants in the wider community. Second, it examines the teachers’ repertoire and frequency of use of variants in light of their social markedness. The study shows that the teachers use the standard variants at rates above even those found in the speech of the highest social strata within the wider community. Despite this normalizing impact of the classroom, the teachers also use all the non‐standard variants found in the wider community. Further, the study examines the impact on the teachers’ variant choice exerted by their socio‐professional characteristics and the communicative functions they perform in the classroom. It shows that the teachers’ use of variants is influenced by their gender, the subject taught, and the communicative functions performed in the classroom in ways that are in line with the social markedness of the variants in the wider community.     

It don't go both ways: Limited bidirectionality in sociolinguistic perception

This article explores the sociolinguistic perception of morphosyntactic variation, using sociolinguistic priming experiments. Two experiments tested participants' perception of the connection between social status and variation in two English subject‐verb agreement constructions: there's+NP and NP+don't. Experiment 1 tested sentence perception and found that exposure to non‐standard agreement boosted the perception of non‐standard agreement, but only for there's+NP. Social status cues had no effect on sentence perception. Experiment 2 tested speaker perception and found that participants were more likely to believe that non‐standard agreement was produced by low‐status than high‐status speakers. Results suggest that, especially for heavily stigmatized variables, non‐standard sentences strongly constrain the social judgments made by speakers, yet social cues do not necessarily constrain linguistic perception. The results suggest that the perceptual relationship between linguistic and social knowledge may be one of only limited bidirectionality. Implications for sociolinguistic perception and exemplar‐theoretic accounts of sociolinguistic competence are discussed.     

Language attitudes and sociolinguistic behaviour: Exploring attitude-behaviour relations in language

This paper is concerned with the relationship between attitude and behaviour in language. Adolescent male and female subjects were recorded and index-scores of their linguistic behaviour compared to their assessment of ingroup members in a verbal-guise attitude experiment, and to their attitudes concerning language usage in a questionnaire. It was hypothesised that male subjects' language would be closer to the vernacular, and that they would also express more positive attitudes towards ingroup members than would female subjects. However, no significant correlation between attitude and behaviour was found in the quantitative analysis, but results from the attitude-questionnaire support our hypothesis: male subjects have more vernacular features in their language and also express more genuinely positive attitudes towards the local vernaculars than do female subjects. Finally, methodological and theoretical implications of these results are discussed, emphasising the importance of using eclectic approaches in future research on attitude-behaviour relations in language.     

Comment confronter mobilité « subjective » et mobilité « objective » ?

The methods for analyzing objective social mobility and subjective mobility as perceived by individuals are reviewed in the case of two surveys: Trois générations by the French Old-Age Fund (CNAV, Caisse Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse) and Formation qualification professionnelle by the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). These two surveys have formulated subjective mobility in quite different ways, but this observation also holds for objective mobility, which, for the purpose of comparison with respondents' subjective evaluations, is defined using specific procedures. A method is proposed for contrasting these two sorts of mobility based on classical mobility tables. When the latter are designed so as to cross three variables (social origins, destinations and average scores of subjective mobility), the spontaneous sociology that can be collectively detected in the assessments made by respondents turns out to be not very different from the scholarly sociology of social categories produced by sociologists. After showing that subjective and objective mobility vary coherently in relation to each other, an additional hypothesis is advanced to account for some discrepancies.