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Acquiring Cuzco: Marginalized language, ideology, and study abroad in Peru

Grammon, Devin
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153198451440002

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Spanish and Portuguese.
The value of study abroad (SA) for foreign language learning is connected to the idea that immersion in a host community provides students with access to expert speakers and authentic target language input. In this dissertation, I investigate the nature of this access through an analysis of the social and cultural politics of language use and communicative participation in SA settings in Cuzco, Peru. The question of how a host context affords language learning remains under-examined within scholarship on SA, where researchers have prioritized the investigation of students’ linguistic gains, perspectives, and experiences in privileged, monolingual societies. Although researchers have struggled to provide generalizations about the outcomes of language learning abroad, a growing number of studies suggest that a SA experience is particularly important for students’ development of sociolinguistic competence vis-a-vis the appropriate use of socially-meaningful linguistic variation from the host community. This dissertation advances this research by investigating how local stakeholders and linguistic features tied to the host community participate in communicative settings for language learning abroad in Cuzco. Through four ethnographic case studies, I provide qualitative analyses of data collected over 16 months of research in Southern Peru focused on immersion SA programs that provide language classes in Quechua and Spanish for U.S. college students. Key investigative foci are language ideologies, systems of ideas and beliefs that mediate people’s contextual understanding and use of language. The perspectives and practices of local SA stakeholders (school administrators, host families, language teachers) and students are presented and analyzed in relation to patterns of language use in Cuzco’s city center, a SA school, language classrooms, and homestays. Overall, findings illustrate the ways in which language learning during SA in Cuzco was imbued with social and political interests that marginalized the practice of local language forms by local actors and students. First, I link language learning in SA to Cuzco’s heritage tourism industry and show how both are tied to the marketing of indigenous authenticity through the use of Quechua. Turning to the management of SA programs and homestays at a SA school, I then illustrate how administrators’ preoccupation with student satisfaction served to circumscribe students’ access to local speakers and cultural context of language immersion. Next, I focus on SA language teachers and show how classroom instruction at the school rested on ideas and beliefs that devalued the local variety of Spanish and linked its features to a rural, Quechua speaking subject. Though students largely eschewed the use of local linguistic variants in SA settings, I suggest that they performed sociolinguistic competence ultimately through their evaluations of language varieties and features in relation to a local, racialized notion of language proficiency. In order to understand how a host context affords language learning, I argue that we must look to the communities, institutions, and ideological structures that shape students’ relationship with the local speakers and language varieties during SA. The findings presented in this dissertation underline the pivotal role played by local stakeholders and cultural systems of ideas and beliefs in mediating students’ sociolinguistic participation in a host community. Understanding these dynamics is particularly important at a time when globalization has transformed both how and why we acquire a second language, encouraging us to reevaluate long held assumptions about SA as a vehicle of foreign language learning.
Anna Babel (Advisor)
236 p.
Linguistics

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Grammon, D. (2018). Acquiring Cuzco: Marginalized language, ideology, and study abroad in Peru [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153198451440002

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Grammon, Devin. Acquiring Cuzco: Marginalized language, ideology, and study abroad in Peru. 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153198451440002.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Grammon, Devin. "Acquiring Cuzco: Marginalized language, ideology, and study abroad in Peru." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu153198451440002

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu153198451440002
891
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.