The Language in Children's Heads: Linguistic Diversity in L1 Education

• Joana Batalha & Ana Luísa Costa & Adriana Cardoso & Sónia Rodrigues & Isabel Sebastião
  In Portugal the number of students with a migrant background has been growing. These students’ origins are mainly from countries where a Portuguese variety is spoken: 46,8% of the students are Brazilian and 24,6% come from African countries where Portuguese is an official language, mainly Angola, Cape-Verde, and Guinea-Bissau (Oliveira, 2021). Besides having a lower academic success (OECD, 2022), students speaking varieties of Portuguese other than European Portuguese have been experiencing linguistic prejudice as reported in press.
  For some years, research on grammar teaching has been showing the importance of valuing data from the children heads (Hudson, 1992), providing students with the opportunity to learn and reflect on their own varieties, including diatopic and diastratic varieties (Devereaux and Palmer, 2019; Hudson, 1992; Reaser et al., 2017). Considering the relation between teachers beliefs towards grammar and grammar learning, there is a need to investigate teachers’ beliefs about language variation and Portuguese varieties, as well as their presence in grammar teaching practices.
  We will explore teachers’ verbalized conceptualizations about students’ varieties based on a quantitative study, complemented by a qualitative study. In the first study, 96 pre-service and in-service teachers of European Portuguese from preschool to secondary education responded to a Likert scale questionnaire. This questionnaire was inspired by the one used in De Angelis (2011) and adapted to the Portuguese context. The tool includes 27 statements with positive and negative beliefs on language variation in the classroom. To extend this study and to explore some of the statistical differences found among pre and in-service teachers, we conducted a qualitative study, based on a semi-structured interview in a focus group. Participants were 7 of the teachers that responded previously to the questionnaire.
  The results show teachers’ positive attitude towards variation; however, some significant differences among pre and in-services teachers were found, suggesting the need to further develop this theme. These results may also contribute to enrich teacher education contexts, departing from teachers own beliefs to deal with varieties in the classroom (Devereaux and Palmer, 2019; Reaser et al., 2017).
  Keywords: teachers’ beliefs, language variation, grammar reflection, Portuguese varieties
  References:
  De Angelis, G. (2011). Teachers’ beliefs about the role of prior language knowledge in learning and how these influence teaching practices. International Journal of Multilingualism. Vol. 8, No. 3, 216-234.
  Devereaux, M. & Palmer, C. (2019). Teaching Language Variation in the Classroom: Strategies and Models from Teachers and Linguists. Routledge.
  Hudson, R. (1992). Teaching grammar. A guide for the National Curriculum. Blackwell.
  Ministry of Education [ME] (2022). OECD Review of inclusive education: Country background report for Portugal. Ministry of Education.
  Oliveira, C. (2021). Indicadores de integração de imigrantes: Relatório estatístico anual 2021. Lisboa: Alto Comissariado para as Migrações, coleção Imigração em Números.
  Reaser, J.,Adger, C., Wolfram, W., & Christian, D. (2017). Dialects at School. Educating Linguistically Diverse Students. Routledge.
• María López García
  Although Spanish is the official language by default in Argentina, different regional Argentinean varieties of Spanish are spoken in the classroom. Other varieties, such as Spanish from bordering countries (such as Bolivia and Perú), from immigration countries (especially Venezuela), and varieties of Spanish in contact with indigenous languages are also spoken. On the opposite hand, grammar teaching materials tend to present a homogeneous and standardized Spanish according to exocentric linguistic norms. Given that we intend to teach grammar from a linguistic variety perspective, these conditions compel us, in the first place, to review materials such as dictionaries, grammars and school books, in order to evaluate which the standard represented therein is; in the second place, to consider the didactic strategies we must develop in classrooms to highlight that standardization is not a correction matter, but a political operation.
  Our research is framed within glotopolitics (Arnoux 2016). This discipline considers that public and private interventions in language are expressions and articulation of social, political, historical and economic processes. According to this disciplinary framework, language is a flexible variable that reflects tensions and disputes to establish a certain social order, and therefore language must always be analyzed with attention to social phenomena. In this field, and supported by the methodological contributions of critical linguistics (Niño-Murcia et al. 2020), the presentation reviews, in first place, the tensions between unifying positions present in Argentinean school materials (Méndez García 2023). Secondly, it suggests approaches for critical reading of these materials, and strategies for teaching school grammar with attention to regional linguistic varieties.
  Keywords: Spanish varieties, language diversity, glotopolitics
  
  References
  Arnoux, Elvira (2016) La perspectiva glotopolítica en el estudio de los instrumentos lingüísticos: aspectos teóricos y metodológicos. Matraga (38): 18-42.
  Niño-Murcia, Mercedes; Virginia Zavala y Susana de los Heros (eds.) (2020) Hacia una sociolingüística crítica: Desarrollos y debates. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
  Méndez García de Paredes, Elena (2023) Pluricentrismo y enseñanza de español lengua extranjera (ELE). Materiales para el contexto colombiano con el sello del Instituto Caro y Cuervo. RASAL Lingüística (1): 161–181.
• Andrea Parapatics
  The paper provides an overall view to the language attitudes of Hungarian speakers towards regional dialects. It summarizes the main lessons of several studies that were conducted by the author and aimed to explore this issue from different viewpoints: teachers (2015-2017), university students (2017), high-school students (2018, 2020), and voice actors (2019) were asked in the last years. Furthermore, an even larger volume of research (2020–2023) is currently underway that analyses villagers’ attitudes of different regions, age groups and educational levels.
  The first study asked 170 primary, middle and high school teachers about intra-language variability. The results draw attention to the shortcomings of teacher training that hinders linguistic tolerance, in fact, supports linguicism, despite their good intentions.
  The second study among university students investigated its consequences: they leave public education (and their home) with very little knowledge on dialects and judgmental attitude. A great interest is shown by the fact that more than 500 questionnaires were filled online within a couple of days in which many negative experiences were told.
  The studies among high school students assessed their dialect features to disprove the misconception that these are reserved for the elderly. This misbelief is a main reason why this issue is neglected in education and teacher training in Hungary.
  Since every film shown in Hungary has a Hungarian dubbing, its language use has a great effect on the viewers. The research among voice actors with the cooperation of their labor union shows the lack of properly used dialects and a prescriptive viewpoint again.
  The results of the ongoing study that is based on almost 600 interview data of villagers reveal that the openness to other varieties of their mother tongue do not depend on education but on their former experiences on linguistic diversity.
  The most important common lesson of these studies is that the regional variability of Hungarian as L1 is not properly taught, and this leads to an unintended exclusionary behavior for many even knowing it. The results can help elaborate recommendations to begin to solve this problem – if there is an official need for it.
  Keywords: language attitudes, language variation, Hungarian dialects
• Kristin Denham
  Conveying the importance of the scientific study of language - especially to those who have not realized that language can be an object of study - is central to my work. Linguistics is not typically a discipline students encounter until university, but introducing it earlier in primary and secondary schools can have profound implications for linguistic justice, student morale and empowerment, student and teacher empathy, and of course for grammatical knowledge as well, with its myriad of applications. I discuss the ways in which language study has been incorporated into L1 classes (English or English Language Arts), as well as into other kinds of study in primary and secondary education. In the US, where the study of L1 “grammar” has long been controversial, because of questions about its relevance and importance, the “scientific study of language”, i.e. linguistics, has been more welcomed into primary and secondary school classrooms, at least in some states. The challenge over the last several decades, since it has been broadly recognized that linguistics is important for teachers, has been to incorporate linguistics into teacher preparation, which is quite variable since each state has distinct and varying teacher preparation requirements, and there is no national curriculum or teacher preparation guidelines. Also, many of the textbooks and curriculum materials for use in schools are marketed nationally, not by state, so even in states and school districts where the scientific study of language informs teacher preparation, the materials teachers are expected to use in the classroom often do not match what they know to be better suited to their students and their learning about language. I discuss ways in which teachers, linguist-teacher partnerships, teacher preparation, as well as textbook and materials development, are all shaping the way that language study is taking place in today’s primary and secondary classrooms. Additionally - and importantly - this approach that advocates for teaching about language across the curriculum reinforces that language itself is an object worthy of study, and students come to better understand how language works, that it is a dynamic system, that they are all experts in their own language system(s).
  Keywords: educational linguistics, scientific study of language, linguistic justice