Volume 28, Issue 4

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United States (which has been criticized as a culturally biased education policy that, through high-stakes testing and broad-based, uniform curricula, discounts the value of non-standard home language varieties largely spoken by working-class children), there has been renewed interest in the relationship between class, language use, and the assessment of academic achievement in the field of education. Despite the inroads that have been made over the past 40 years by linguists in establishing the contrary, recent educational and language policies have served to reignite the difference vs. deficit debate largely attributed to the early work of both Basil Bernstein and William Labov. Unfortunately, much of the language acquisition work upon which policy-makers are relying is founded on outdated information and misrepresentations of the varieties under consideration (African American English in particular); and still the scholastic performance of these children is measured according to class-based rubrics. In order to address the lacuna in the field, in this study, working- and middle-class adults and children aged two through six were shown a series of pictures including ‘normal’ referents (e.g., a cat), and unfamiliar combinations (e.g., a clock with wheels), which they were asked to identify. There were both age and class dependent differences in terms of naming behaviors (e.g., the number of words and morphemes and linguistic construction types). The older and middle-class participants used more sophisticated linguistic strategies (such as descriptive phrases) than the younger participants, and the working-class children showed a greater reluctance to engage in naming strategies beyond one-word overextensions. These disparities suggested that the participants not only employed different strategies by age, but that there was also a class-linked difference in their understanding of the task. When these results are interpreted in light of the deficit/difference debate, it is clear that linguists and educators continue to face the same issue: non-standard varieties are linguistically adequate, but there remains a societal insistence on furthering the primacy of middle-class linguistic structures and language behaviors which serves to maintain a cycle of educational failure for working-class children.

This study examines how English speakers address, and are addressed by, their Japanese colleagues in Japan, and the deciding factors and motivation for the choice of address-forms in a given context. The local norms of English and Japanese are also examined through interviews with 15 British and 15 Japanese office workers in their home countries, to investigate the differences between the two norms that may cause English speakers and Japanese difficulty when showing familiarity in cross-cultural interaction. For the actual analysis of the interaction in English between English speakers and Japanese, I examined two English language teaching TV programmes, and interviewed seven English speakers and four Japanese speakers working in Japan. The main analysis focuses on how English speakers employ address-forms with their Japanese colleagues at work, in English in Japan. The analysis shows that speaking in English does not always mean following English norms, and that English speakers often accommodate the address-form of their Japanese colleagues to local norms, i.e. last name + san . This decision seems to be heavily influenced by not only the local context, but the Japanese speakers' English proficiency level. When Japanese colleagues are not ready to accept the use of their first name , then English speakers' adoption of the local norms seems to be an effective approach to establishing solidarity, which seems to be crucial in a cross-cultural business context.

This paper explores the role of the court interpreter in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication in the courtroom. Drawing on the analysis of the discourse of witness examinations interpreted by Korean interpreters in Australian court proceedings, this paper argues that in the absence of cultural and/or linguistic explanations by the interpreter, evidence given by witnesses from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds may not be accurately or fully interpreted, and this can have potentially serious consequences for the witness in the adversarial context. The discussion highlights the significance of interpreters' disclosure of linguistic and cultural issues which are related to the accuracy of interpreting during court-room examination and suggests that ‘conduit’ interpreters may in fact adversely influence adversarial court proceedings.

Examining the linguistic repertoire of the Anglophone community living in Montreal, this article provides an analysis of the representations of the variety of French spoken by the first generation of young Anglophones who had experienced different types of contact with French. The relation between functional competence and usage of French is examined through a qualitative analysis of interviews collected from young Anglo-Montrealers, and an analysis of an attitudinal experiment of Francophones judging the spoken French of Anglo-Montrealers. The results show that lexicon is the most important criterion for Anglo-Montrealers, followed by grammar and phonology. This suggests an implicational scale corresponding to their level of competence and their own perception of their performance in French. However, phonology acts as the most important criterion among the Francophones assessing the L2 French of Anglo-Montrealers. Sociostylistic competence also plays a major role, since Anglo-Montrealers point out the difference between the French they acquired at school and the actual norms of Quebec French, and recognize the need for manipulating stylistic variation. Among the Francophone judges, sociostylistic competence acts as a clue for evaluating the participation of L2 speakers in the speech community.

Although the literature on CS between Arabic and French in different bilingual speech communities is wide, few studies have dealt with the Tunisian context and no previous work has ever been done on the Tunisian business sector as a specific group using more than one pair of languages to communicate. This case study investigates the variety of languages chosen in two Tunisian businesses, focusing mainly on the social constraints on CS between Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic and Tunisian Arabic), French and English. Moreover, it presents the complex linguistic situation in terms of the different motivations for CS between in-group members and also with foreign colleagues and clients. The findings are generated from the recorded data of conversations, observations, interviews, and questionnaires conducted inside the businesses.