'The case of really really American English': Why and how well international students learn to use discourse LIKE

Friday, February 3, 2023
3:30 – 5:00 pm
Folwell 118 or via Zoom

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'The case of really really American English': Why and how well international students learn to use discourse LIKE 

Discourse LIKE is both ubiquitous in native English speech and socially stigmatized in most English-speaking communities. However, it is typically not introduced in English as a second/foreign language classrooms and is not represented in mainstream English textbooks, so speakers of English as a second language usually encounter it only in settings where they have regular access to native English speech. A U.S. college campus is a good example of such a setting, with international students who come from non-English-speaking countries constantly exposed to the speech of their domestic peers. In this talk, I will present the results of a comprehensive study of how twenty-five international students in that setting use discourse LIKE, how it is connected to their beliefs about it, and whether there is evidence of acquisition of known linguistic and social constraints on LIKE usage in their speech.

Irina Zaykovskaya is a Lecturer in Russian and Linguistics at the University of Minnesota. She holds a PhD in Second Language Studies from Michigan State University, USA, and specializes in the second language acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. Her particular area of expertise is language attitudes and ideologies, and she studies how beliefs and attitudes affect one’s language learning and their L2 perception and production.