Language attitude change among bilingual program students in technology-based Sister Class exchanges

• Main Author: Sayers, Dennis Michael
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-1990
• Subjects: Bilingual education; Educational technology; Ethnic studies; Language arts; Minority & ethnic groups; Multicultural education; Sociology
• ISBN: 9798641910185

This study examines change in language attitude toward speakers of their home language, Spanish, among 89 students in four upper elementary bilingual program classrooms who participated in technology-mediated Sister Class projects in partnership with students in Puerto Rico. The research contrasted two instructional approaches, one centering on student-led small groupwork and another emphasizing teacher-facilitated whole groupwork. The study sought to determine under which of these two conditions is increased status and prestige conferred upon speakers of the minority language. Students were identified as Spanish-dominant, Bilingual or English-dominant on the basis of holistically-rated translation tasks, teacher assessments, and performance on reading comprehension tests in both languages. Two measures of the dependent variable, change in language attitude, were employed. For the Cross-"Language Dominance Group" Inventory, students employed photographs of classmates as markers and individually rated, using a 4-point continua, her or his classmates on five attributes: how hard-working, how friendly, and how easy to work with they are, as well as how helpful they are to the evaluating student, and how helpful they are to the teacher. For the Matched Guise task, two "guises" (a Spanish and an English version of a short narrative) were read onto an audiotape by a bilingual Puerto Rican girl unknown to the subjects. Students listened to the tape in groups and evaluated the Spanish and English recordings on a four-point scale for four constructs: correctness, the listener's personal identification with the speaker, appropriateness for school, and likelihood of achievement. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) by regression yielded results which confirmed the research hypothesis that improvement in students' language attitudes toward Spanish speakers would improve in all classes, suggesting that technology-mediated Sister Class exchanges with distant colleagues from the students' "mother culture" constitute an intervention which can produce language attitude changes over a brief period of five months. Results from the "sociometric" Cross-Language Dominance Group Inventory supported the prediction that greater improvement would occur in small groupwork classes, while the "stereotypic" Matched Guise indicated greater improvement in the whole groupwork classes.