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A STUDY OF SOCIAL VARIATION IN ADULT SECOND LANGUAGE AQUISITION
Author(s) -
Eisenstein Miriam
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1982.tb00977.x
Subject(s) - psychology , variation (astronomy) , task (project management) , linguistics , control (management) , language proficiency , speech community , pedagogy , philosophy , physics , astrophysics , management , economics
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.