The influence of code-mixing and speaker information on perception and assessment of foreign language proficiency: An experimental study

Abstract

The study draws on different lines of research on the influence of social and other information on the evaluation of language production in school contexts. On the one hand, names or other background information is well known to influence teachers and other gatekeepers' evaluations, and on the other hand, code-switching and other non-standard features in pupils' language production are also known to affect assessment outcomes not only of linguistic skills but also of general academic potential. Taking into account these two research traditions, this study investigates the influence of different ethnically marked names and code-switches on teachers' evaluations of pupils' oral proficiency in French as a foreign language. Three authentic oral texts were rerecorded once by inserting German words and once without such inserts. Additionally, these samples were presented either as stemming from a bilingual Swiss German native or from a multilingual SwissGerman Serbian boy. A total of 157 future teachers rated the speech samples with respect to different dimensions (fluency, correctness, but also the pupil's academic potential in general). The analyses provide evidence for positive and negative stereotyping of the Serbian first name, and there is also an unexpected interaction with code-mixing into German: without insertional mixing, the texts with a Balkan name are perceived as being superior, but with such mixing this superiority is lost and turns into significantly lower assessment scores.

Attitudes towards code-switching among adult mono- and multilingual language users

“…Lawson and Sachdev's (2000) own study of 169 Tunisians found CS to be rated the lowest of all the guises. A similar pattern was uncovered by Berthele (2012) who investigated the influence of different ethnically marked names (Serbian) and code-switches on Swiss teachers' evaluations of pupils' oral proficiency in French as a foreign language. Without CS, texts with a Balkan name were perceived as being superior, but with CS this superiority was lost and the samples got significantly lower assessment scores.…”

“…The first one is that choosing a score on a Likert scale to reflect attitudes requires a certain degree of abstraction. Berthele (2012) showed that attitudes towards CS changed significantly depending on whether the person doing the CS was a fellow Swiss or a foreign national. In other words, attitudes towards CS are linked to who is doing it in what context.…”

Can I dismiss the stereotype – as my teacher did? Influence of stereotype activation and an immigrant teacher on student learning

“…An alternative explanation why Turkish-origin students did not suffer from the stereotype threat is that by referring to a modifiable attribute, i.e., family language, we triggered a weaker threat experience for the stigmatized group than if we had referred to a stable attribute, i.e., ethnic background: negative stereotypes are particularly threatening if they imply that one’s capabilities are immutably and permanently restricted by one’s group membership (Good et al, 2003 ; Froehlich et al, 2016 ; Mendoza-Denton et al, 2008 ). The threat for the Turkish group may have been further weakened by the fact that the stereotype was expressed in relation to families in which Turkish is also spoken (i.e., two languages instead of only one), thus implicitly even referring to a greater language competence of this group (see, e.g., Berthele, 2012 ; Park-Johnson, 2020 , for how manifestations of bilingualism are perceived). Finally, it is conceivable that as we activated the stereotype by a blatant cue (Nguyen & Ryan, 2008 ), i.e., by explicitly referring to Turkish students’ inferior learning capabilities, and removed the threat in the control-condition by a subtle cue (Nguyen & Ryan, 2008 ), i.e., by referring to potential difficulties of adolescents from both family language groups, the two experimental conditions were not sufficiently different from each other in their effect: in the control condition, in principle, each participant could interpret the statement that young people often have difficulties learning vocabulary as referring to themselves.…”

Knowledge sharing and language diversity in organisations: influence of code switching and convergence

“…Many sociolinguistics studies underline the negative attitude of the people toward code switching (e.g. Berthele, 2012). Not only the audience but also speakers who themselves switch between languages are sometimes critical of their own code-switching practices when they are brought to their attention (Dewaele and Wei, 2014).…”