copenhagen summer school

Do you speak Manchester?

Gerry HowleyUniversity of Salford

Image by Pink Sherbet Photography (CC BY 2.0) http://bit.ly/kWM2Ca

Image by Darren 131 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) http://bit.ly/lpvdeo

• Lack of research into regional/vernacular dialect acquisition in L2

• Lack of investigation into migrants’ language use

•Helps us to understand linguistic variation and change (e.g. Cheshire et al. 2008; Sharma 2005)

•Contributes to our understanding of SLA (Bayley & Regan 2004)

Why L2 dialect acquisition in

migrants?

Image by Denis Collette (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) http://bit.ly/iQ0EEe

Recent studies

SLA methodology

Baker (2008): Questionnaire - increased contact with local speakers affects degree of acquisition of Utah dialect features.

Variationist methodology

Wolfram et al. (2004): Conversational interview - acquisition of the native speaker features is highly variable. Observe that orientation toward certain social and cultural values may influence production of local variants.

Schleef et al. (2011): Sociolinguistic interview - social networks seem to have an impact on acquisition of the local variant.


My study• To what extent do

migrant teens acquire features of the Manchester dialect?

•How do their patterns of variation differ from their locally-born peers?

•How do their patterns of variation correlate with the ethnic diversity of their social networks and/or Communities of Practice? Image by See-ming Lee (CC BY-SA 2.0) http://bit.ly/jI8Nr1

Summary•Important to study migrants’ language

use for both dialect acquisition and second language acquisition

•Recent studies used methodologies both from SLA and 1st wave variationist sociolinguistics: indication that social networks and CoP may be key in understanding differences in dialect acquisition

•My study sets out to provide further understanding by taking a mixed methods approach, heavily informed by in-depth ethnographic observation


Thanks for [email protected]

http://twitter.com/gerryhowley

http://virtual-doc.salford.ac.uk/gerryhowley/


copenhagen summer school

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