A Study of Social Variation in Adult Second Language Aquisition

This study focuses on the developing sensitivity of 74 adult English learners to 3 English dialects in their speech community and the extent to which these learners have assimilated community norms regarding dialect speakers. On the basis of a dialect discrimination task, a speaker evaluation task, and a personal interview, the awareness and attitudes of English learners were compared to those of a control group of native English speakers attending the same university. An integration of the results from the three tasks seems to indicate that dialect sensitivity and attitude formation develop in a parallel fashion so that by the advanced level of proficiency, learners have assimilated native dialect attitudes to a surprising extent. Attitudes appear to stem from personal experience which is reinforced by other factors such as the opinions of others and characters presented in the media.