Thread by @suzyjstyles

So pleased to see our first report of translanguaging in child-directed speech as a poster at #WILD2022!
Since our Corpus team couldn't travel to San Sebastian, our fab lab-mate Han will be standing by to answer questions during the poster session at 16:40 CEST) today👇and also..

..in a bit of an experiment, I'll also be standing by for any Q&A about methods, transcription protocols, how on earth we managed 92% retention rate for the 143 children in the sample (8m to 4y), over three picture-narration tasks spanning 4-6 months!

This poster is really exciting for me because it was a study we rolled out during lockdown. At the time we were planning an ambitious series of home visits, but suddenly we weren't able to visit any homes! So we redesigned our entire protocol for online participation.

We had already created our storybook 'What a Scary Storm', so that parents could narrate a wordless picture story in any language (including a mix of languages)...

And in our reimagined study, we could show the pictures online during a Zoom video call. Parents could talk to their children about what was happening on the screen, and say 'next!' when it was time to 'turn' the page - some of the little kids really got into that part of it 😂

So the job was to find ways to recruit and engage parents during a very stressful time - many were working from home and doing double duty as primary carers at the same time - we needed a study that made sense to parents. So we tried to think what parents might want help with...

In our previous parent-facing engagements in Singapore we would always get two kinds of questions:
Q1. How should I use my different languages together with my child?
Q2. My kid doesn't talk much yet, what can I actually say to them?

We thought we could support parents newly who were stuck at home with their child a bit more than usual, by sharing two kinds of info:
1. tools that help a family understand more about their full range of language resources
2. top tips for talking together with littlies

So we created a month-long series of parental information, to be served up in the format of a daily tip. You can see tips from the first week in the Talk Wheel!
(We made physical ones with a little spinning arm, and everything!)

And each morning our fearless Intervention team (let's be honest, it was mostly the wonderful Shaza Amran) would send out a Whatsapp message with a single tip, a link to a web page with more info, and some enthusiastic emoji action. Each evening a followup Q about the tip.

Over the four weeks of the study we moved on from the Talk Wheel, to tips about Interactivity (holding back and forth convos), Complexity (using a wide variety of words) and Mind Matters (thinking and talking about others minds). The full collection is OA: doi.org/10.21979/N9/W1…

All of these tips have a long history in developmental psychology and the field of language acquisition, so they come well recommended. (That said, almost all of the evidence for these comes from predominantly Western, monolingual, middle class families so *treat with caution*)

To help support our parents in their decisions about language planning, we were able to offer all families who took part a customised report about their child's language exposures: a LEO Report!
More here: doi.org/10.21979/N9/XQ…

These two resources were part of the promise we made to the parents taking part in our studies.
We paid everyone too (with more $$$ for more tasks completed), and all of the compensation was done in 💵cash transfers💵 not vouchers. That was really important during a pandemic!

So we managed to recruit a muh-hassive 143 families to the microlongitudinal study, and we managed to keep almost all of them involved and engaged until the end.

We have been furiously transcribing this wonderfully mutlilingual dataset...

In today’s poster we’re presenting how all 143 parents use their different languages while they are telling the wordless picture story. Here is the full dataset 😍
Some parents talk for only about 2 mins, others for 20. Here in SG Almost all parents are translanguaging 🎉

Here’s a zoom on the first 2 minutes of speech so you can see the lovely jittery pattern, as people use different words from different languages throughout their conversations 🤩
Yup it’s true - English (blue) is dominant in most of the convos…

So for context, the official languages of Singapore are English (the main lang of education, and governance), along with languages historically linked to the largest ethnic groups: Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. There’s one other label though: we call it “Red Dot”

This is a special label for local words arising out of language contact - words crossing language boundaries. Sometimes nobody knows which language they came from. Sometimes they come from one language, but they mean something different when spoken outside that lang…

We spent quite a bit of time working with the local community to find a label that people liked, and felt proud of. There are other labels used locally that suggest these words (mostly loans) are somehow deficient compared to the ‘original’ forms.

But we think of them differently - we see them as evidence of rich, productive linguistic creativity, and they make people who use them feel instantly ‘at home’ in their languaging.

@FeitingW has led our Red-Dot work from the very beginning. You can see some of our work in progress in last year's @SRCDtweets poster.
srcd21biennial.ipostersessions.com/default.aspx?s…

@FeitingW @SRCDtweets So now, with these language labels, we can graphically illustrate the ways in which people move between their linguistic resources over the course of a conversation. We can look at the ✨granularity✨ of this behaviour - how big or small are the grains combined together?

@FeitingW @SRCDtweets And what I love about this is that this kind of behaviour is rich and dynamic. It is structurally sophisticated, and full of nuances about how people invoke different aspects of their identity and communicative intentions at any moment. It is an authentic #BilingualAdvantage

@FeitingW @SRCDtweets For any monolinguals in the house who think this is a form of language use that is 'bad' or 'broken' I can't put it more clearly: translanguaging is a skill monolinguals simply don't have. It is playing two (or more) instruments at once, and making up the tune as you go along 🎶

So - the poster shows our first explorations into translanguaging behaviour - granularity, rates of mixed utterances, and whether parents with different language beliefs or language plans use their langs differently. Drop by the live Q&A at #SRCD2022 or here to find out more 😇

You can now view the Poster anytime on our OSF page :)

osf.io/cynvm/