Study funded by UKRI (PI: Dr Rowena Kasprowicz)
The Progression in Primary Languages project is a four-year, longitudinal study exploring language learning in primary schools across England, which teach French, German, or Spanish.
Study funded by AHRC
In order to compare language attitudes and reported language use expressed in interviews with actual language choices, I use the broad theoretical framework of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) (Giles, 2016) as this provides scope to explore how/whether participants changed the way they spoke (either using another language entirely or modifying features of the same language) to accommodate their interlocuter.
For children growing up speaking the majority language of a country, there is often no question about what language will be used when they start school. This, however, is not the case for 40% of children all over the world, who are confronted with a completely foreign language when they go to school for the first time (UNESCO 2016).
It occurred to me recently how differently the same utterance can be viewed depending on who utters it. It was simply a case of a noun which had been verbed which got me thinking.