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This paper examines the health of the four largest Polynesian Pasifika languages in Aotearoa/ New Zealand (New Zealand). It presents perspectives and interpretations from the researchers and writers who are at the same time, parents and grandparents of Pasifika children of Tongan, Samoan and Cook Islands ancestry. It examines: findings from the 2006 Census; a major socio-linguistic study examining these four languages in New Zealand's most multicultural city between 2000 and 2008; and insider community sources. These indicate that Pasifika languages in New Zealand show significant signs of language shift and loss, with several languages unlikely to survive unless urgent maintenance and revival measures are adopted. It seeks reasons for the shift of Pasifika families to using more English. It argues that the discourses of family language for private use, and English for education and public use, emerged in the Pacific, came with the migrants and is now deeply entrenched in New Zealand. The paper suggests that expanding the role of Pasifika languages into education and the public domain through Bilingual/Immersion Education is the prime strategy for future survival of these languages. We use initial capitals for the term Bilingual/Immersion Education in this article to indicate that this is a major world approach to education. Following Baker (2006), Garcia (2009), and May and Hill (2005), we use bilingual and immersion to cover all forms of first language and second language medium education. This dual use is very important in New Zealand where until recently a rigid and artificial separation was made between Bilingual Education and Immersion Education (May & Hill, 2005, 2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pacific languages face extinction unless efforts are made to retain them. This paper recommends two ways to avoid this: incorporate Pacific languages and knowledge into research and teaching at tertiary level education, and create or adopt a universal auxiliary language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguistic stereotyping hypothesis holds that even brief samples of speech varieties associated with low-prestige groups can cue negative attributions regarding individual speakers. The converse phenomenon is reverse linguistic stereotyping (RLS). In RLS, attributions of a speaker's group membership trigger distorted evaluations of that person's speech. The present study established a procedure for ascertaining a proclivity to RLS for individual listeners. In addition to RLS, variables reflecting degree of multicultural involvement (e.g., proportion of friends who are nonnative speakers, amount of language study) predicted speech evaluations. Although the RLS measurement procedure outlined here requires more demanding administration than mere paper-and-pencil self-reports, it has the advantage of reflecting authentic RLS processes. Measuring individuals' RLS levels can help screen teachers, job interviewers, immigration officials, and others who are called on to make judgments about the oral proficiency of speakers of nonprestige language varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern nations like Aotearoa-New Zealand have a history of subjecting indigenous and minority peoples to education experiences that abandon us, destroy our languages and cultures, and actively strive to assimilate us. Throughout the world, greater than ever numbers of indigenous communities are establishing their own educational structures and systems that are better suited to their linguistic, cultural, educational and economic development and advancement. The hard work by parents, teachers, researchers and likeminded colleagues are having significant impacts on collective change for the betterment of indigenous and minority peoples. I shall focus this paper, then, on the complex relationships confronted by indigenous Māori people teaching and learning betwixt worlds, that is to say the relations between Māori, Pasifika and New Zealand European Pālangi in the university. The focus is on beings in relationships or the relations between the languages, beliefs and practices of the diverse groups of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous works in English have revealed that disfluencies follow regular patterns and that incorporating them into the language model of a speech recognizer leads to lower perplexities and sometimes to a better performance. Although work on disfluency modeling has been applied outside the English community (e.g., in Japanese), as far as we know there is no specific work dealing with disfluencies in Spanish. In this paper, we follow a data driven approach in exploring the potential benefit of modeling disfluencies in a speech recognizer in Spanish. Two databases of human-computer and human-human dialogs are considered, which allow the absolute and relative frequencies of disfluencies in the two situations to be compared. The rate of disfluencies in human-human dialogs is found to be very close to that found for similar databases in English. Due to setup factors, the rate of disfluencies found in human-computer dialogs was remarkably higher than that reported for similar databases in English. In any case, from the point of view of speech recognition, the high frequencies of disfluencies and the distinct features of the acoustic events related to them support the need for explicit acoustic models. The regularities observed in the distribution of filled pauses and speech repairs reveal that including them in the language model of the speech recognizer may be also helpful. The extent to which the number of events depends on utterance length and on the speaker is also explored. Statistics are shown that follow previous studies for English, and a sizeable space is devoted to comparing our results with them. Finally, various possible cues for the automatic detection of speech repairs—a key issue from the point of view of speech understanding—are explored: silent pauses, filled pauses, lengthenings, cut off words and discourse markers. As previously observed for English, none of them was found to be reliable by itself. More information, especially at the acoustic-prosodic level, is no doubt needed to reliably detect speech repairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses links between the conditions of developing child bilingualism and the adult outcomes in semiotic contrast in elicited speech and codeswitching.Analysis of interaction of children raised as bilinguals shows that from the beginning they can recognize the appropriate language for addressees. When the lexical repertoire is inadequate, borrowing occurs, and codeswitching of longer segments appears before age two. Throughout childhood and adolescence, codeswitching has increasing interactional functions as children's pragmatic skills grow.Some adult codeswitching relies on semiotic differences implied by language. It is likely that both such codeswitching and the dual selves shown in elicited discourse in different languages are limited to specific sociolinguistic situations and personal histories. These include education in a second language, adult immigration, and frequent contact with a monolingual community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A four year longitudinal research study on pupils' progress in Language, Mathematics, Social Sciences and Natural Science throughout secondary education was undertaken. The paper focuses on the differences found in each education cycle, on the student's diverse socio-cultural level and on the interaction between both variables. The possibility of comparing the students' results in both compulsory and optional subjects allows a better interpretation of the results. Our conclusions confirm the importance of Primary Education and the substantial difficulties of low SES students in compulsory subjects when compared with the other SES students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]