Language attitudes in pre-adolescent multilinguals : a comparison of five data elicitation techniques

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study had two aims. The first was to identify the most useful data elicitation technique/s to use when eliciting data from multilingual South African pre-adolescents who have an African language as their mother tongue, and the second was to ascertain what those pre-adolescents' language ideologies pertaining to English and Afrikaans as additional languages were. Data was collected in the cosmopolitan Wolmer area of Pretoria North from 10 participants (5 male, 5 female) ranging from 10 to 12 years of age. A comparison was made between the number of themes pertaining to language ideology successfully elicited by five data elicitation techniques, namely language portraits, the telling of short stories, open-ended interviews, closed-ended interviews, and commenting on short language-related video clips. Despite various methodological challenges, the results revealed that closed-ended interviews yielded the highest quantity of themes of the above-stated data elicitation techniques, with half of all elicited themes elicited by means of this method. Open-ended questions was the second-most successful elicitation technique, with 40% of the themes elicited via this technique. The other three techniques each elicited 4% or less of the themes, with the telling of short stories proving ineffective and eliciting no relevant themes. Regarding the second research question, concerned with the participants' language ideologies, no negative themes relating to English as their second or additional language were prevalent among the participants. However, the data did reveal that at least 60% of the participants held at least one negative outlook towards Afrikaans. The thesis concludes by making recommendations on how to improve future research on language ideologies of pre-adolescents by refining the elicitation techniques and addressing the issue of mismatch in language proficiency between the participants and the data collectors in the study. Another recommendation is that future research should include monolingual pre-adolescents and do a cross-comparative analysis between the language ideologies of multilingual and monolingual pre-adolescent South Africans.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University