The acquisition of sociolinguistic competence in a Welsh immersion context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research in Canada shows that French immersion students acquire a limited range of registers available to L1 speakers and do not reach full sociolinguistic competence (Mougeon et al. 2010). Welsh immersion differs insofar as pupils from Welsh-speaking and non-Welsh-speaking homes are taught together. However, no studies compare the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence between these groups. The first aim of the research was to conduct a variationist analysis of the stylistic repertoires of students who speak Welsh at home. The second aim was to compare these patterns with those of students who do not speak Welsh at home to determine whether sociolinguistic competence is acquired. Data were collected from two areas—one with frequent Welsh use in the community and one without—to assess whether sociolinguistic competence is more easily acquired with greater community exposure, as shown in study abroad (Regan et al. 2009) and migrant contexts (Ryan 2018). Data were elicited in three speech contexts of differing formality. To identify style-shifting patterns, three stylistically variable features of Welsh—possessive pronouns, past tense verbs, and intensifiers—were examined. Findings reveal that by the age of 17, immersion students have acquired many of the same constraints and patterns of use, regardless of home language background. More formal contexts elicited higher rates of more formal variants for each of the three features. Furthermore, I found that those who did not speak Welsh at home were more likely to use informal variants overall, showing that they are more likely to be modelling their speech on their peers, rather than the more formal educational variety, which sets this study apart from other variationist work on international immersion. This finding shows that combining pupils of different home languages is likely to promote the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence among young immersion pupils.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.004 |
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".