A Study of Social Variation in Adult Second Language Aquisition

Abstract

This study focuses on the developing sensitivity of 74 adult English learners to 3 English dialects in their speech community and the extent to which these learners have assimilated community norms regarding dialect speakers. On the basis of a dialect discrimination task, a speaker evaluation task, and a personal interview, the awareness and attitudes of English learners were compared to those of a control group of native English speakers attending the same university. An integration of the results from the three tasks seems to indicate that dialect sensitivity and attitude formation develop in a parallel fashion so that by the advanced level of proficiency, learners have assimilated native dialect attitudes to a surprising extent. Attitudes appear to stem from personal experience which is reinforced by other factors such as the opinions of others and characters presented in the media.

Free classification of American English dialects by native and non-native listeners

“…However, the native listeners were significantly more accurate than the non-native listeners in both experiments. The difference in accuracy between the native and non-native listeners is consistent with Eisenstein's (1982) finding that beginning learners of English, who had been in New York City for an average of 7 months at the time of testing, performed more poorly on the perceptual dialect discrimination task than the more advanced learners. Most of the non-native listeners in the current study had been in the United States for less than one month at the time of testing and therefore had even less direct exposure to dialect variation in American English than Eisenstein's (1982) participants.…”

“…The difference in accuracy between the native and non-native listeners is consistent with Eisenstein's (1982) finding that beginning learners of English, who had been in New York City for an average of 7 months at the time of testing, performed more poorly on the perceptual dialect discrimination task than the more advanced learners. Most of the non-native listeners in the current study had been in the United States for less than one month at the time of testing and therefore had even less direct exposure to dialect variation in American English than Eisenstein's (1982) participants. However, information about experience with native speakers of American English was not obtained from the non-native participants in this study, and some may have been exposed to American English in the classroom through pedagogical materials or American instructors.…”

“…For example, Eisenstein (1982) found that both native and non-native listeners' judgments of level of education and socioeconomic status were significantly lower for African American Vernacular English and New York English than for General American English. As in her dialect discrimination task, however, Eisenstein (1982) observed that the more advanced learners' attitude judgments aligned more closely than the less advanced learners' judgments with those of native speakers. Similarly, Alford and Strother (1990) reported that both native and non-native English listeners judged Southern and Midwestern American English more positively than New York English in a matched-guise attitude judgment task.…”

“…However, a small number of studies have explicitly examined the perception of sociolinguistic variation by second language learners. In one early study, Eisenstein (1982) conducted a perceptual dialect discrimination task with native and non-native English listeners in New York City. The non-native listeners included beginning, intermediate, and advanced learners of English.…”

Gendering the ‘learner’: Sexual harassment and second language acquisition

“…Larsen-Freeman and Long, in their 1991 textbook, report on "the generally accepted fact" in LI acquisition that females display a rate advantage, at least in the beginning stages Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 6/20/15 4:29 PM of first language acquisition, and then go on to report on two studies that show female superiority in some aspects of second language acquisition (i.e., Eisenstein 1982;Farhady 1982). Likewise, many of the studies described above are driven very explicitly by sex differences research.…”