Sociolinguistic Agency in the Learning and Teaching of Regional Variation: Revisiting Pedagogical Norms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pedagogical norms for teaching regional varieties of a target language suggest teaching features that are widely used and valued by the language community, and that support overall linguistic development. This dissertation considers the place of sociolinguistic agency, or learners’ willingness to adopt local linguistic conventions, in this pedagogical norm. It consists of three studies investigating social and affective challenges in the acquisition of features typical of Quebec French, and exploring potential pedagogical solutions to these challenges. \nStudy One compared native and near-native speakers’ use and understanding of the -tu question particle, a typical QF vernacular feature. Ten dyads consisting of native and near-native speakers completed tasks in casual, semi-controlled, and controlled situations, and a short interview probing their awareness and understanding of QF question variation. Despite having higher metalinguistic awareness, near-native speakers significantly underused -tu compared to native speakers. They tended to favour -tu in lexicalized expressions and slightly overused it in controlled situations. \nStudy Two investigated the effects of engagement and social networks on sociolinguistic performance. Twenty-one advanced QF learners completed a social network questionnaire and a sociolinguistic interview, which provided data on engagement and sociolinguistic performance. Sociolinguistic performance varied according to type of feature, engagement, and satisfaction with network support. Use of informal features (first-person on and ne deletion) correlated positively with high engagement. The stigmatized colloquial vernacular -tu was virtually absent, and the non-stigmatizednon-colloquial vernacular, subject doubling, correlated with social network satisfaction. Perceptions of QF and attitudes towards the QF community also appeared to play a role. \nStudy Three presents the theoretical framework, design, and methodology for a classroom study examining the effects of concept-based instruction on learners’ understanding, appropriateness judgments, and emerging sociolinguistic agency. The study illustrates how sociolinguistic agency might be addressed in the classroom and evaluated as a pedagogical outcome. Drawing on these studies, the thesis proposes adding an agentive criterion to the pedagogical norm. This criterion considers learners’ identities, attitudes, and perceptions of the regional variety in deciding which features to teach. It offers suggestions for developing and applying the agentive criterion and broader implications for the teaching and study of sociolinguistic variation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".