Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 15, Issue 2, 1992

This article contains a report of a case study on language shift and language loss in three generations of a Dutch immigrant family in New Zealand carried out in 1990/1991 (Folmer 1991). Language shift refers to the shift from Dutch to English and language loss to the loss of the mother tongue Dutch. In addition to language shift and loss, the personal linguistic history of the subjects and their (language) attitudes were examined; these topics are only discussed indirectly in this article.

One first generation member, five members of the second generation and two third generation children took part in the investigation. The instruments used were an analysis of letters, an interview, a domain questionnaire, an editing test and a correction test.

It was found that language shift increases with each generation. The factors education, exogamy, (language) attitudes and age also proved to be important. Furthermore, the type of domain or activity made a difference.

In both the first and the second generation the degree of language loss in Dutch was rather low. Some trends in the loss process were established and certain word classes turned out to be more problematic than others.

In this paper data are presented on some aspects of metalinguistic awareness in Dutch adults who emigrated to Australia at least 25 years ago. A grammatically judgement test was administered to 37 informants in Melbourne. The data show that the migrants do not differ significantly from a control group in the Netherlands. This outcome, which is in line with earlier findings from Dutch migrants in France, suggests that metalinguistic skills in L1 are extremely resistent to attrition.

Disfluent phenomena such as pauses, hesitations and repairs, are investigated in a corpus of forty-two short samples of spontaneous speech of native French speakers and learners of French. Significant quantitative differences between native speakers and learners were found and interpreted in the light of Bialystok’s and McLaughlin’s theories of language processing and the two key concepts of automaticity and control. A greater requirement of processing time on the part of the language learners was attributed to their greater use of controlled processes. An analysis of lexical and syntactic selection and repair was carried out to determine where control was applied. While native speakers were attending to the construction of the referent, learners were more concerned with syntactic construction.

This paper looks at student response to different types of corrective feedback in an English for Academic Purposes [EAP] program. Reactions were collected by means of two questionnaires. The first was completed at the end of the semester and reflected actual experience with the feedback discussed. The second provided a wider overview of attitudes to the issue and was collected at the beginning of the following semester and with a different group of learners. The results suggest that, given the demand for correction and feedback, the time devoted to it, and the pressure on students and staff in EAP programs to develop learners’ accuracy and fluency, it seems essential to make procedures and their rationale more explicit and to explore how effective various techniques are in actually producing permanent change in learners’ interlanguage development.

The following article gives an account of the results of a research project which looked, inter alia, at motivation among first year university students of French, both beginner stream and post school certificate students. While it is currently fashionable to underline the economic and social usefulness of language study, information is not freely available on why students who enrol for French actually do so. The extrinsic / intrinsic dichotomy of motivations was adopted as a working principle for classifying motivations. This dichotomy may be likened to the integrative / instrumental division used by Gardner and Lambert (1972) We observed that students were motivated by a wide variety of factors. Though motivations are sometimes hard to classify on a binary scale, there was nevertheless no clear preference for extrinsic or pragmatic reasons; if anything, personal or intrinsic reasons seemed to dominate.

More than 12,000 migrant engineers have migrated to Australia in the past four years – the majority NESB professionals of prime workforce age selected under the skilled immigration program.

These engineers are currently experiencing extreme levels of unemployment – in part due to Australia’s recession, but in part due to disproportionate labour market rejection.

This paper examines the critical ‘gatekeeping’ role of the employment interview. It explores the cultural attitudes a range of East European engineers bring to Australian engineering job interview questions – in particular ‘process’ questions (requiring detailed description of knowledge of engineering processes), and ‘self-promotion’ questions (inviting positive presentation of demonstrated professional skills).

The paper then analyses the videotaped job interview performance of two East European engineers, who answer such questions poorly in interviews conducted by the Institution of Engineers, Australia. The paper suggests that disparities between country of origin interview strategies and those used in Australia might usefully be targeted as areas for further research. Such research could lead to more effective cross-cultural interview training, while lessening the risk of interview failure.

It has been estimated by those who work in the computing industry that sixty per cent of their time is taken up in communication and only forty per cent is spent on technical work. There is then a clear need to develop the communicative abilities of those in the computer industry. Well designed communication courses for people in computing would benefit from linguistic descriptions of the discourses of this industry. A linguistic description of the structure and genre of the systems analyst’s interview should provide the basis for some of these courses. This paper discusses the genre of the two major types of interviews used by systems analysts and identifies the genre element as the unit of discourse structure that links the lower level and higher level units of discourse structure within systemic linguistics. It draws upon data collected from the depth phase of a national systems analysis project. It is argued that for a full linguistic description of the structure of lengthy speech events within a systemic linguistics framework it is necessary to take both a top down (generic) and bottom up (discourse units) approach.

A bilingual child’s development of word order in German and English subordinate clauses was followed between three and five years of age, and a number of diversions from the development of word order in such clauses by monolingual children was noted. Of particular interest is the fact that incorrect dependent clause structures in German were more likely to be due to intra-language influences from German main clause structures than from English. The findings are discussed in the light UG claims made by Clahsen (1988) concerning the word order development in monolingual children.