This sociolinguistic study of the linguistic practices of bilingual couples describes the conditions, processes and results of private language contact. It is based on a unique corpus of more than 20 hours of private conversations between partners in bilingual marriages. Adding to its breadth of coverage, these private conversations are supplemented with larger public discourses about international couplehood. The volume thus offers a corpus-driven investigation of the ways in which ideologies of gender, nationality and immigration mediate linguistic performances in private cross-cultural communication. The author embraces social-constructionist, feminist and postmodern approaches to second language learning, multilingualism and cross-cultural communication. In contrast to other titles in the field which have focused almost exclusively on the socialization of bilingual children, this book explores what it means to one's sense of self to become socialized into a second language and culture as a late bilingual.

This sociolinguistic study of the linguistic practices of bilingual couples describes the conditions, processes and results of private language contact. It is based on a unique corpus of more than 20 hours of private conversations between partners in bilingual marriages. Adding to its breadth of coverage, these private conversations are supplemented with larger public discourses about international couplehood. The volume thus offers a corpus-driven investigation of the ways in which ideologies of gender, nationality and immigration mediate linguistic performances in private cross-cultural communication. The author embraces social-constructionist, feminist and postmodern approaches to second language learning, multilingualism and cross-cultural communication. In contrast to other titles in the field which have focused almost exclusively on the socialization of bilingual children, this book explores what it means to one's sense of self to become socialized into a second language and culture as a late bilingual.

This book provides a detailed linguistic analysis of the communication between highly proficient bilingual couples, each consisting of a native speaker of English and of Swiss German. Combining the accounts of ten couples on their language use with an analysis of their actual linguistic behaviour, several areas of the partners' speech and interaction were closely examined. These include their language choice and language mixing, attitudes, expression of emotions, swearing, as well as their humour and laughter. In addition, the influence of the bilinguals' mother tongue and gender on their language use was explored. Thus, the study provides valuable insights into the language practices of established bilingual couples, while also contributing to the fields of fluent late bilingualism and gender research.

The articles in this special issue examine the relationship between gender identity and second language learning from a variety of perspectives, all of which share a basic grounding in sociocultural theories of learning and poststructural theories of language. (Re)constructing Gender in a New Voice presents a range of approaches to questions

This study explores dispute sequences in talk between bilingual couples communicating in Japanese. Specifically I examine naturally occurring face-to-face talk between Japanese wives and their American husbands who communicate primarily in Japanese at home. Conversation analysis (CA) is employed to document occasions where the talk between these couples evolves into problematic talk such as disputes. The analytical focus is on sequences where problematic talk is related to the participants' orientation to such contrasting identities as native/non-native speaker and expert/novice categories. A total of 16 hours of conversations were audio-recorded in the couples' homes while they were engaged in everyday activities such as eating meals. The analysis of the data revealed several separate but related issues. First, the couples made their language expert and novice identities relevant in their talk when they conducted metalingual talk, i.e., talk about the Japanese language. Specifically, these identities emerged through repair sequences on occasions when one person had difficulty understanding or producing a lexical item and his or her spouse provided assistance with the problematic item. Second, problematic episodes, such as dispute sequences, were often occasioned by metalingual talk. Third, Japanese native and non-native speaker identities were sometimes separated from differential language expertise. When this happens, the native speaker disputes it and problematic talk occurs. The findings indicated that language expertise should be thought of as something that is independent to being a "native speaker" of a language. Being a language expert is locally situated in and negotiated through the ongoing talk and non-native speakers can be language experts as well. However, the data in this study show that the native speakers of Japanese, Japanese wives, sometimes perceived their non-native American husbands as disputing their expertise when they were engaged in metalingual talk. The American husbands occasionally displayed their expertise and argued against their Japanese wives on linguistic issues or did not acknowledge the expert information provided by the wives. When that happened, their talk became problematic, as the native speaker wives claimed that they were the experts and not the non-native husbands. In sum, this study revealed that dispute in intercultural marriage is in some cases due to language expertise displayed in the interactions. Dispute emerges through the on-going talk and is not determined based on the second language speaker's disfluency or differences between the speakers' cultural backgrounds, a claim that is frequently made in other fields such as intercultural communication, second language studies, and sociolinguistics. This newly identified phenomena based on language expertise is at the root of dispute in bilingual couple talk.

The present volume represents a variety of portraits of what happens when families attempt to raise children in Spanish while living in English-speaking societies. Aided by the foregrounding chapter by Suzanne Romaine about language and identity and the afterword by Carol Klee that ties together many issues brought up throughout the collection, the reader gains a more complete understanding of the variables that contribute to Spanish bilingualism in English-speaking societies, and by extension a more complete understanding of the dynamic nature of bilingualism in general. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together an impressive array of sociolinguistic environments while keeping the two languages constant. We hope that it marks the beginning of comparative analyses of bilingualism, acquisition outcomes, and identity construction across environments that share the same languages, but where important disparities exist in the sociolinguistic landscapes.

A collection of papers that document various dimensions of the ways in which the language learner and the language proficiency interviewer use language to accomplish oral language assessment tasks.