EXPRESSING NEEDS AND WANTS IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF CHINESE IMMIGRANT WOMEN'S REQUESTING BEHAVIOR (WOMEN IMMIGRANTS).
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TextDescription: 320 pSubject(s): Language, Linguistics | Speech Communication | Education, Bilingual and Multicultural | Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | 0290 | 0459 | 0282 | 0631Dissertation note: Thesis (ED.D.)--COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY TEACHERS COLLEGE, 1998. Summary: This dissertation examines the roles, characteristics, contexts, and consequences of ESL requests in the lives of a group of Chinese-speaking immigrant women studying in a job-training program in the Chinatown in a large American city. Taking an ethnographic approach to examining, describing, understanding, and interpreting ESL requesting behavior, this study provides a "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) of local contexts, of individuals' social, cultural, and linguistic lives, of L1/L2 behaviors related to the making of requests, and of the construction and reconstruction of social, cultural, and linguistic identities in an immigrant community. It incorporates input from those within these learners' social and educational networks--family, teachers, classmates, and others--and seeks to represent both emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives of sociolinguistic phenomena.Summary: Various themes that emerged from case studies of my four key informants are discussed, and they are supplemented with examples and illustrations from the other 16 ESL speakers who took part in the study. Of particular significance are the strategies used to modify the force of speakers' requests (through varying degrees of directness and modification), variables that affect the strategic selection of request behaviors (including social, situational, and cultural variables), and finally developmental aspects of interlanguage pragmatics, specifically viewed in terms of L2 socialization.Summary: This study makes a unique contribution to the existing body of research in interlanguage pragmatics by employing different methods of data collection, analysis, and presentation, case studies and narrative of individual language learners and users, and the author's own reflections as a participant observer in the project site. Furthermore, the participants in this study represent an under-studied but vital constituency of immigrant ESL learners, for whom the expression of needs and wants through English requesting behaviors is neither optional nor trivial. It is tied up with their survival, well-being, and productivity within their adoptive land. Finally, this study argues that without examining speech acts in authentic contexts of use--with their own historical antecedents, interpersonal negotiations, personal and societal significance, and often elaborate and extended discourse realization, our understanding of such language functions as requests is incomplete.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 59-06, Section: A, page: 1998.
Sponsor: LESLIE M. BEEBE.
Thesis (ED.D.)--COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY TEACHERS COLLEGE, 1998.
This dissertation examines the roles, characteristics, contexts, and consequences of ESL requests in the lives of a group of Chinese-speaking immigrant women studying in a job-training program in the Chinatown in a large American city. Taking an ethnographic approach to examining, describing, understanding, and interpreting ESL requesting behavior, this study provides a "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) of local contexts, of individuals' social, cultural, and linguistic lives, of L1/L2 behaviors related to the making of requests, and of the construction and reconstruction of social, cultural, and linguistic identities in an immigrant community. It incorporates input from those within these learners' social and educational networks--family, teachers, classmates, and others--and seeks to represent both emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives of sociolinguistic phenomena.
Various themes that emerged from case studies of my four key informants are discussed, and they are supplemented with examples and illustrations from the other 16 ESL speakers who took part in the study. Of particular significance are the strategies used to modify the force of speakers' requests (through varying degrees of directness and modification), variables that affect the strategic selection of request behaviors (including social, situational, and cultural variables), and finally developmental aspects of interlanguage pragmatics, specifically viewed in terms of L2 socialization.
This study makes a unique contribution to the existing body of research in interlanguage pragmatics by employing different methods of data collection, analysis, and presentation, case studies and narrative of individual language learners and users, and the author's own reflections as a participant observer in the project site. Furthermore, the participants in this study represent an under-studied but vital constituency of immigrant ESL learners, for whom the expression of needs and wants through English requesting behaviors is neither optional nor trivial. It is tied up with their survival, well-being, and productivity within their adoptive land. Finally, this study argues that without examining speech acts in authentic contexts of use--with their own historical antecedents, interpersonal negotiations, personal and societal significance, and often elaborate and extended discourse realization, our understanding of such language functions as requests is incomplete.
School code: 0055.
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