Language at the Early Elementary Age

Previous chapters have demonstrated patterns in teacher speech and metalinguistic discourse that suggest ways in which students at Meizhang are likely to use language. On the metalinguistic side, we have seen that, while dialect varieties in English are framed as equally valid by teachers and students, Chinese metalinguistic discourse has promoted the notion of a single standard. At the same time, non-standard Taiwanese Mandarin dialect features have been treated as privileged and are not targeted for explicit correction, but are instead reformulated to the target standard. These phenomena suggest that students who already use Taiwanese Mandarin features might not feel pressured to alter them, but students who are acquiring Mandarin in this environment would nonetheless get the message that they should learn Standard Mandarin and avoid non-standard Taiwanese features.

In the analysis of teacher language use, all three Chinese teachers examined varied in their use of standard retroflex and dental sibilant initials in predictable ways. Most notably, teachers were more likely to use standard retroflex in reading and instructional contexts, and more likely to use non-standard dental initials in administrative and behavior management contexts. It was proposed that teacher language use would give students a sense of the social meaning of these variants, and also that these patterns of variation could be exploited by students seeking to acquire standard initials. Without examining student language use, we do not know whether students are acquiring their teachers' patterns of variation, or using information from those patterns in an attempt to construct a different variety that is either more or less standard. Given the metalinguistic environment at Meizhang, in which the notion of a single standard Mandarin is promoted and students are told not to produce non-standard variants in the abstract, the most likely scenario is that students are targeting a more standard variety. On the other hand, because standard retroflex is associated with instruction, it could conceivably be the case that students conclude from the available evidence that standard pronunciation is for teaching only.