On Sat, 12 Sep 2009 11:31:47 -0400, Michael Sylvester wrote: [snip] >(Btw,Americans,British and Australians are the only people that >speak only one language).
On behalf of Americans, especially undergraduates, here is some research (though a little old at this point) that shows how diverse language usage and background was at a major urban university around 1990 (I believe there may be greater diversity today at that university as well as at other schools such as the City University of New York and other public colleges and universities): http://www.springerlink.com/content/w2648067688m8726/ A more comprehensive report of that study is available at: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/Home.portal?_nfpb=true&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=Palij&searchtype=basic&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=kw&_pageLabel=RecordDetails&objectId=0900019b80103239&accno=ED299814&_nfls=false or http://tinyurl.com/l9pc3h This research was used to make some points about introductory psychology students participation in subject pools and experiments in memory and psycholinguistics: |Palij, M. (1988). What happens to the unwanted subject? Comment on the |value of undergraduate participation in research. American Psychologist, 43, |404-405. Bilinguals don't neccesarily show off their non-English language abilities in front of English speakers, they instead use their non-English language abilities for language apporpriate contexts and members of their language community. It would be easy for an English speaking teacher to fail to recognize how diverse the language community might be in their class. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
