L2 influences

[quay at icu.ac.jp]

Dear Shelley,

I have a paper that is coming out soon that addresses your concerns to a
certain extent:

Quay, S. (2004). ?Caregiver input and language development?. In Gordon Fulto
n, William J. Sullivan & Arle R. Lommel (eds.), LACUS forum XXX: Language, T
hought and Reality. Houston, Linguistic Association of Canada and the U.S.,
pp. 227-234.

My paper examined the effects of the discourse of non-native versus native c
aregivers on a three-year-old child?s acquisition and use of German. The int
eractions between the child and his German-speaking interlocutors ? a non-na
tive Chinese babysitter who was just learning how to speak in German and a n
ative German babysitter ? were evaluated in terms of discourse structure and
 syntactic constructions. The child?s utterances were also compared to the u
tterances of his monolingual daycare peers. It was concluded that the impact
 of the speech of non-native caregivers are not of immense linguistic signif
icance as long as children are also exposed to native speakers in their envi
ronment. In my studies of trilingual children, I have also found, as Fred de
scribes, that the peer model is stronger than parental models when trilingua
l children speak mainly the language of their peers rather than their home l
anguages.

Best wishes,

Suzanne


> I do not know of specific studies taht address this issue, but an obvious
> set of counter-examples is
> immigrant children or children of parents who speak limited or accented
> English but have ample
> exposure to same-age peers who speak English fluently -- such children do
> not acquire their parents' accented or
> "broken" English, but learn the variety spoken by their peers.
>
> At some point, peers are a more influential model than parents -- either
> because there are more peer than parent models
> or because of identity issues.
>
> Fred Genesee
>
> At 01:32 PM 18/10/2004 -0400, Shelley Velleman wrote:
>>A question has arisen in a Mass. school system as to whether a
>>kindergarten teacher whose first language is not English could have a
>>negative impact on her normally-developing students' English language
>>development by being a poor role model.  (She occasionally omits
>>function words, but is quite intelligible.)  Since being bilingual is
>>clearly not a disadvantage, it seems obvious to me that exposure to a
>>person with a slightly different system should do no harm to a child's
>>first language system.  (And, for example, over the past 28 years I've
>>so far been unable to detect any negative linguistic effects on my
>>husband, who was raised by such an ESL speaker i.e. his father.)  But,
>>does anyone know of any literature that would specifically, directly
>>address this question?
>>
>>Thanks.
>>
>>Shelley
>>
>>