The Significance of Teacher Speech

In keeping with other two-way immersion programs, the Meizhang school aims to achieve a three-fold competency: students who are bilingual, biliterate and bicultural. The ‘bicultural’ portion of this mission represents not only familiarity with the traditions and institutions of both cultures, but also encompasses sociolinguistic and communicative competency; as noted in the school’s promotional materials, students are meant to learn to communicate and ‘think’ in both languages. To reach full cultural competency in a second language, students would need to acquire such skills as the ability to shift registers in various contexts, knowledge of regional and social variation, and other competencies comparable to those of a native speaker growing up surrounded by other native speakers (Andersen, 1990: 1). Given what we know about how sociolinguistic knowledge is acquired – specifically, that it is primarily acquired indirectly through exposure to speech communities in everyday life rather than through explicit instruction – it is unreasonable to expect students enrolled in a two-way immersion program to acquire sociolinguistic knowledge identical to that of children in monolingual Mandarin or English environments, or even to children in other bilingual environments, because their experiences will necessarily be quite different. The goal of schools like Meizhang, however, is not to produce children who are identical to native speakers in every respect, but to make them sufficiently competent to operate within speech communities of native speakers. This task is still a daunting one, considering the limited hours and contexts available in which to expose students to the range of styles and meanings in two different languages. Moreover, the two languages used in the Meizhang program are spoken by multiple communities in various parts of the world, encompassing many different dialects and cultural conventions. Different native speakers of English and of Mandarin coming from different communities may have different sociolinguistic practices, and therefore we cannot be sure that students are receiving a unified message, even when they are absorbing sociolinguistic information.