Locating the Transrhetorical in Multilingual Writing

Students' lived lives and experiences are tools that they can use to learn and own their writing as they grow and become fluent writers. Theorists have described different ways that students draw from their first languages and culture to write in another language. This chapter showcases how two African students bring their culture of orality into the classroom and use it as a tool to understand, develop, and conquer their writing. The chapter gives examples of the students' narratives as they navigate their writing. As they write, they constantly dig into their culture through tools of translation in order to perform, inform, and transform their writing in English, a language that is different both linguistically and culturally from their own.

Language Variation in Mandarin as a Heritage Language: Subject Personal Pronouns

Because of limited language input, different dominant languages, and learners’ differing backgrounds, the acquisition of heritage languages is distinguished from the acquisition of L1 and L2. Few studies of Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) have explored whether students can acquire native-like sociolinguistic competence and language-specific variables with educational input. Based on a sociolinguistic variationist perspective, this study investigates the acquisition of variation between null and overt subject personal pronouns (SPP s) by heritage learners in an undergraduate-level Mandarin program. A total of 11,970 tokens were collected through classroom observation, sociolinguistic interviews, and narratives. Measuring mixed-effects logistic regression with Rbrul (Johnson, 2009), results show that the overall usage pattern of SPP s by CHL students largely resembled that in the input provided by the language program. Results also demonstrate that linguistic constraints including coreference, person and number, and verb type, and social factors such as discourse context, first languages, course level, and age of arrival had a significant effect on SPP expression by CHL learners. Implications for CHL development and variationist studies in heritage languages are discussed.

Receptive academic vocabulary knowledge and extramural English involvement – is there a correlation?

Extramural English (EE) exposure has been shown to correlate with general vocabulary knowledge. It remains uncertain, however, how academic vocabulary knowledge correlates with EE and can be explained by EE factors and demographic factors. Therefore, an academic vocabulary test, a background questionnaire, and a survey on current EE involvement were administered to 817 Swedish upper-secondary students in university-preparatory study programmes. A linear model revealed little explanation from demographic factors (age, gender, number of first languages, length of English instruction, and parental educational level) whereas EE factors (reading, listening & viewing without textual support, viewing with Swedish subtitles) accounted for 26% of the variation. Since extensive EE involvement may support the incidental learning of academic lexis, the paper suggests pre-tertiary instructional principles being guided by extramural as well as intramural incidental learning opportunities.

Problems of teaching verb categories (contact, version and passive voice) of the Georgian language to non-native speakers

Teaching Georgian to non-native speakers, it is important to focus on categories students' first languages lack or express them in a different way. The paper discusses the formation of indirect contact, neutral version, and passive voice in verbs. Infixes -in- and -evin- are used to form forms of indirect contact. They are added to infinitive forms without markers - -in- is used with stems containing vowels, and - evin- with stems without vowels. At the same time, prefix a- is added to verbs at the beginning, and the thematic marker -eb at the end. Like all other thematic markers, the latter disappears in the second series of conjugation. Deriving version forms is a little more complicated, as there are neutral version forms without markers and with the prefix a-, subjective and objective version forms with the prefix i- for the first and second persons and u- for the third person in both singular and plural forms. Neutral version is formed with the prefix a- in verbs with eb- and ob- thematic markers apart from several exceptions and verbs with the am- thematic marker, apart from one exception (as version is impossible in the third series of conjugation, examples are in the first and second series of conjugation): a-šen-eb-s - a-a-šena, a-tbob-s - ga-a-tbo, a-b-am-s - da-a-ba). Thematic markers make no difference in forming subjective and objective version forms. If a verb is semantically able to have subjective and/or objective versions, verbs in the first and second series of conjugation take forms of subjective and/or objective version. Forms of subjective version use prefix i-: c'ers – i-c'ers, dac'era – da-i-c'era. In forms of objective version, verbs take the prefix i- in the first and second person and u- in the third person, both singular and plural. Like in the forms of indirect contact, the aforementioned rule of using person markers can be put to use: m-i-c'ers is me, g-i-c'ers is šen, u-c'ers is mas/mat, gv-i-c'ers is čven, g-i-c'ert is tkven, u-c'eren isini mas/mat. As for the passive voice, it can be formed with prefixes (i- and e-), a suffix (-d) and without any markers. Thematic markers and the presence/absence of a vowel in the infinitive play a role in forming verbs in the passive voice. In the passive voice, prefixes are added to verbs with single stems (without thematic markers) and verbs with -av, -am, -op, -i thematic markers, those with vowel interchange, and some verbs with the -ob thematic marker. Verbs with a vowel in the infinitive form the passive voice the thematic stems of the second series of conjugation: xat’va – i-xat’eba, e xat’eba; breca – i-briceba, e-briceba, while stems without vowels form the passive voice from the infinitive without markers. There are several such verbs with -av and -eb thematic markers, verbs with -i, -am and -eb thematic markers and some verbs with the -ob thematic marker: šek’vr-a – i-k’vreba, e-k’vreba; da-d-eba – i-deba, e-deba; č'r-a – i-č'reba, e-č'reba; dadgm-a – i-dgmeba, e-dgmeba; ga-q’op-a – i-q’opa, e-q’opa; da-xrč-oba – i-xrčoba, exrčoba. Verbs with a vowel and the -eb thematic marker, apart from two exceptions, form the passive voice with the suffix -d from the thematic stem of the second series of conjugation: šen-eb-a – šen-d-eba. The passive voice is formed without markers from verbs with the -ob thematic markers. The thematic stems of the second series of conjugation are used as the roots: ga-tb-ob-a – tb-eb-a. The passive voice with suffixes (with the -d suffix) is formed only in verbs with the - eb thematic marker. The passive voice markers is formed only in some verbs with the -ob thematic marker. Other verbs can form the passive voice only with the i- and eprefixes. Verbs in the passive voice with the prefix e- have only two persons (emaleba is mas). Other passive voice forms can have only one person (imaleba is, c'itldeba is, idgmeba is, išleba is, iq’opa is, igrixeba is, xmeba is). The author hopes that this approach to these problems can help Georgian language learners.

The role of individual factors in L2 vocabulary learning with cognitive-linguistics-based static and dynamic visual aids

The present study aims to verify the impact of dynamic aids on learning L2 prepositions in relation to individual learner variables. Situated within the cognitive linguistics (CL) framework and differing from previous research, the present study hypothesizes that dynamic (animated) aids are not equally effective for all learners; rather, their effectiveness differs according to learners’ first languages (L1s) (Chinese or Japanese) and information-processing styles (verbalizers or imagers). To verify this hypothesis, we utilized learning materials comprised of static and dynamic images for three English spatial prepositions (above, on, over). After conducting a Style of Processing questionnaire, we administered three cloze tests (pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest) of target words to Taiwanese and Japanese participants (N = 109), whose L1s differed in terms of their linguistic proximity to English. Although no significant differences were found between the treatment groups in tests for all participants, the results were differentiated by individual factors. In results of a two-way ANOVA, Taiwanese participants showed significantly greater improvement from the pretest to posttest than Japanese participants when the participants used dynamic images, whereas the Japanese group made more learning gains from the posttest to the delayed posttest test. Moreover, imagers obtained more benefits from the visual aids, whether static or dynamic, than verbalizers. Our findings indicate that CL-based visual aids are beneficial and that individual factors, especially learners’ L1, may produce different learning effects, especially in multimedia environments.

Translating narrative style

Within the context of the Thinking-for-translating framework, this paper analyses the translation of boundary-crossing events including Manner from English into German (both satellite-framed languages) and Catalan and Spanish (both verb-framed languages) to investigate whether student translators transfer these specific types of motion event or otherwise omit (or modulate) some information. Three groups of student translators (having respectively German, Catalan and Spanish as their mother tongues) were asked to translate a series of excerpts from English narrative texts into their respective first languages. The resulting data suggest that the way student translators deal with the translation of these events is influenced by their mother tongues and the nature of the event itself (axis, suddenness, type of Figure, type of Path, type of Manner). It is also noted that German students’ translations are much more similar to the published versions than the Catalan and Spanish ones, and that Catalan and Spanish-speaking students tend to omit boundary-crossing.

The recent evolution of first languages in Catalonia

The case of Catalonia has often been pointed out as a case of success in the field of language policy, based on the improvement in its legal situation, the increase in the number of people who know it, and the extension of its use in certain fields. To contribute to a complete evaluation of the current language policy model in Catalonia, this article assesses the evolution of the first languages of the population over the last fifteen years. The study shows that during this period, despite some oscillations, Catalan has remained in stable numbers of L1 speakers in absolute terms, thanks essentially to very strong patterns of intergenerational transmission in both linguistically homogeneous and mixed couples. However, significant immigration during this period has substantially increased the weight of other languages and, to a lesser degree, Castilian, so that in relative terms Catalan has been reduced as a first language between 2003 and 2018.

Processing possessives in French as a foreign language: Design of an experiment

The paradigm of possessive determiners differs in systematic ways across languages and causes cognitive resolution problems in the interpretation of a foreign language. Based on previous investigations into cross-linguistic influences (CLI) in learners’ interpretation of possessive determiners, this article presents the design of an experiment for testing English, German and Norwegian adult learners of French. We specify two kinds of processing problems: a direction problem (orientation towards possessor vs. possessee) and a problem of lexical parasites (‘false friends’). The experiment is directed at learners’ spontaneous interpretation of the singular possessives "son", "sa" and "ses", on account of a partly false friendship with the possessive determiners in these learners’ first languages.