Text Speaker 3.29 Multilingual

The second pattern found in both data sets includes the influence of language over the preference for consuming information like academic reading and news. The findings suggest that it is likely that students will code-switch in academic reading contexts and when reading news. The focus group data give us more insight into this information behavior. For example, the data from the Colombian undergraduate student tell us that her code-switching is in very specific domains, like leisurely reading and religious reading, and that she has difficulty reading academic Spanish. This information is important to know for building collections and for supporting students who may want to take their academic experiences to their home country for an internship, for a job, or for pursuing graduate work. In this study we also see how dialect preferences in English influence how Caribbean speakers gravitate toward the British Standard English with consuming news and current events, which is also an example of dialect-switching. These data showing how English dialects can affect information behavior is important for helping librarians understand that, not only is there diversity across languages, there are dialectal differences within major language groups like English, Chinese, Spanish, and others.

Text Speaker 3.29 Multilingual

There are many practical recommendations relating to linguistic diversity, including creating a multilingual-friendly environment. Reference assistance could include offering specialized library instruction or orientations for immigrant students, first-generation college students, and international students. Public services staff could also receive linguistic diversity training that includes information on ESL and EFL populations. Linguistic diversity training might also focus content on creating sensitivity and awareness of patrons who are linguistic minorities (for example, Spanish speakers who speak other Central American languages such as Mayan languages), as well as information about Creoles and pidgins, how accents work, nonwritten languages, and varieties of spoken English that may be relevant to the patron population. Computer labs can be language-friendly, with a variety of keyboard formats and printers available for people who need to print e-mails, share notes, and look up concepts in languages other than English. In the focus group interview with the Colombian undergraduate student, she spoke about wanting to gain some experience working in Colombia; however, she lacked the Spanish academic vocabulary to be competitive. To help students like her, academic librarians could create LibGuides for non-English scholarly sources that include Latindex, for example (www.latindex.unam.mx/latindex/inicio). Libraries could focus on hiring multilingual librarians. There is clearly a need for more research in transnationalism, especially in academic libraries that have a high number of foreign-born students. Are these students trying to use their American college degrees and create transnational careers that take advantage of their cultural capital? Are academic libraries spaces currently treated as monolingual rather than multilingual spaces? How does this affect our practice, and how can libraries change to support these students in their information needs? Monica Jacobe, director of the Center for American Language & Culture at The College of New Jersey, speaks about immigration trends in student success:

The United States does not have an official language at the federal level, but the most commonly used language is English (specifically, American English), which is the de facto national language. It is also the language spoken at home by the great majority of the U.S. population (approximately 78.5%).[6] Many other languages are also spoken at home, especially Spanish (13.2% of the population), according to the American Community Survey (ACS) of the U.S. Census Bureau; these include indigenous languages and languages brought to the U.S. by people from Europe, Africa, and Asia. However, the majority of foreign language speakers are bilingual or multilingual, and they commonly speak English. Although 21.5% of U.S. residents report that they speak a language other than English at home, only 8.2% speak English less than "very well."[7] Several other languages, notably creoles and sign languages, have developed in the United States. Approximately 430 languages are spoken or signed by the population, of which 177 are indigenous to the area. At least fifty-two languages formerly spoken in the country's territory are now extinct.[8]

It has long been recognized that the production of speech sounds of a given language is characterized by a large degree of between and within-speaker variability. Much of speech research in the last half-century has been devoted to the description of this variability, and to the development of theories which predict where, when, and why particular variants of segments occur. The present paper focuses on two types of within-speaker variability: Variability resulting from differences in predictability between elements in a given speech string (i.e., differences in redundancy), and variability resulting from differences in prosodic context.

Thus far only little attention has been devoted to examining the role of modality in bilingual processing of emotionally-laden narratives, as opposed to single words. Hence, the main aim of the current experiment was to examine whether late proficient bilingual speakers are less sensitive to emotionally-laden narratives presented in their non-native (English) compared to the native tongue (Polish), and whether such effects are modulated by modality. Namely, we wanted to investigate if there is a preference for auditory stimuli when processing emotional language in both L1 and L2. To this aim, we used emotionally-laden narratives, which were presented to our participants in the visual (a text displayed on the computer screen) as well as auditory modality (an audio recording presented via headphones), in their L1 and L2. In order to limit the effect of a potential confounding variable, sadness was selected as one basic emotion to be evoked in all texts. Although so far, much attention has been devoted to studying sadness, for instance, by means of using sad pictures (e.g., Ritz et al. 2000; Rainville et al. 2006), videos (e.g., Gross and Levenson 1997; Tsai et al. 2000), and musical excerpts (e.g., Krumhansl 1997; Etzel et al. 2006), little research has been conducted on the processing of sad narratives.

Both Polish and English experimental texts in both the visual and auditory modality were pretested using web-based Likert-type surveys. Each survey was completed by 30 raters; yet, raters whose scores were more than 3 SDs from the mean were excluded from final analyses. While Polish experimental materials were evaluated by native speakers of Polish, English stimuli were assessed by both English native speakers and Polish learners of English as their second language. The raters who took part in these pretests did not participate in the experiment proper. Table 2 provides demographic information concerning raters whose ratings were included in the analyses.

To account for potential differences in how visual and auditory materials were perceived, a mixed-design analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed with 4 experimental texts (Text 1 vs. Text 2 vs. Text 3 vs. Text 4) as a within-subject factor, as well as 2 modality (Visual vs. Auditory) and 3 group (Polish native speakers vs. English native speakers vs. English L2 learners) as between-subject factors. The findings showed an effect of modality, \(F(1, 160)=11.05, p=.001, \upeta _\mathrmp^2=.065\), with higher sadness ratings for the auditory (\(M=4.63, SE=.06\)) relative to visual materials (\(M=4.35, SE=.06\)). The effects of group as well as the interaction between group and modality were statistically insignificant (\(p>.05\)). The results of the normative studies on the experimental stimuli are reported in Table 3.

It might have however resulted from either late age of L2 acquisition or from a more formal context of L2 acquisition, as our participants acquired their second language around the age of 9 in the formal school setting in Poland. Harris et al. (2006) pointed to both high L2 proficiency level and early AoA as requisite factors in comparable emotional resonance to both native and non-native emotionally-laden stimuli. Therefore, since our participants were sequential bilingual speakers, their L2 language acquisition began once the emotional regulation systems of the brain had already been developed, which might have resulted in a weaker interconnectivity of L2 emotional-laden words with the emotional system of the brain (Bloom and Beckwith 1989; Caldwell-Harris 2014).

Furthermore, the present findings might also provide support for the emotional context of learning hypothesis (Caldwell-Harris 2014), which postulates that emotional responding is modulated by the context of second language acquisition and use, as language acquired via immersion is assumed to be more emotional compared to language learned in a formal school setting (Dewaele 2010; Degner et al. 2012). Future research is however needed in order to further elucidate the role of age of L2 acquisition and the context of L2 acquisition in how bilingual speakers respond to emotionally-laden linguistic stimuli in their native and non-native language.

In light of the results obtained in the present study, implications for the language classroom will be as follows. First, if we as teachers want to fulfil the goals of the students sampled, we need a communicative methodology and, especially the use of authentic material in the class, such as real texts from the Internet, newspapers or magazines, real listening in the form of real interaction among speakers of English (native and non-native), songs, films and programs broadcasted in English, and above all, provide them with as many opportunities to use the language as possible in the classroom and outside it. 350c69d7ab