Sociolinguistic development among instructed learners: a longitudinal investigation of Chinese learners of English

Against the backdrop of the predominant focus on sociolinguistic development among study-abroad and immersion learners in the case of some languages other than English, this study offers an investigation in an instructed classroom setting among university learners of English in China. While previous studies have offered a range of insights into sociolinguistic development, the nature of potential sociolinguistic development over time in a classroom context remains unclear. Moreover, the insights available predominantly stem from studies of learners of specific languages other than English, with the question remaining as to how they may apply to learners of English whose status as a global lingua franca may differentially affect sociolinguistic development in that language. The study presented here thus offers a quantitative longitudinal investigation over three months of three different variables in the participants’ spoken discourse, namely variable realization of -ing/in, -t/d deletion, and contractions. The findings indicate some changes in the use of the three variables over the research period, although the changes were not statistically significant. The findings point to the learners’ increased sensitivity to a range of factors hypothesized to condition the use of each variable in the case of linguistic and nonlinguistic factors.