Social Sciences | November 20, 2024
Navigating language and culture through sociolinguistics research: Elizabeth King
Lydia Oesterling
Elizabeth King is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and intersections between these two subfields, particularly sociolinguistics of education.
Her dissertation research focuses on “teacher-influencers,” or freelance language teachers on social media platforms, and the marketing of language online. Fall 2024 is her fifth semester as instructor of record for LING 222: Language in Globalization, which introduces students to important topics in sociolinguistics.
Can you give a definition of sociolinguistics?
Many people will hear linguistics and think, “You study a bunch of languages,” but what we’re really interested in is how language functions. There are various subfields of linguistics, like psycholinguistics or second language acquisition research, which are more experimental, and look at how language functions in the brain.
Syntax and semantics are more theoretical and look at the underlying systems that govern language use. Phonetics looks at how language is produced, and what we see in the audio data that we collect. There is also applied linguistics, which is concerned with using linguistics research to address real-life problems, such as language teaching. Sociolinguistics, specifically, is interested in the connection between language and culture, and in that way, it has overlap with a lot of the other fields.
The term I made up to describe linguistics is “Frankenfield,” or a “Frankenstein-field,” because it has many different origins. Semantics, for instance, has its origins in philosophy. There was a period of time where philosophers were studying philosophy by using linguistics. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, has some origin in anthropology and that stream of research.
I would say that we look at William Labov’s work a lot. He did a lot of sociophonetics and variationist sociolinguistics work and used linguistic data to advocate for social causes and to argue against racist ideologies and theories that were prevalent at the time. It’s helpful to contextualize the field and understand that it has roots in different disciplines as well.
Can you tell us a bit about your journey as an educator?
I feel like people put so much pressure on you as an undergraduate to carve out your whole career trajectory. I remember not knowing what I wanted to do for a long time. I chose English as my major just because that’s what I liked. As a white monolingual English speaker, my experiences with language learning were mostly in high school. I thought I was bad at language learning, because it didn’t come naturally to me, so when I studied abroad in China, I was learning language because I needed to. Once it clicked for me that language is for communication, it was much more interesting.
I have a master’s degree in English, and because I went to a smaller school, linguistics was housed under my program and I was able to take a lot of linguistics courses. I also lived in Taiwan for two years while I was on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. Through that experience, I became interested in language policy, language ideology and how those things shape our world.
I would also say that my time teaching elementary school has shaped how I approach teaching. One of the schools that I worked at was a rural school, and the other was a school part of Taiwan’s Austronesian population of indigenous peoples. They are deeply affected by language policy and people’s beliefs about students and I realized that we have to work within the context of what these students need. I was so impacted by seeing when you can get students curious about something and how far they can take it. I think this scales up into teaching any age group or any subject, so I try to approach my teaching in that way.
What drew you to teaching and researching linguistics?
I think teaching wasn’t something that I set out to do; I think it’s something that I kind of tracked into. I completed my undergrad in 2012, which was a time when you didn’t necessarily need many qualifications to go to another country to get a job teaching English. Through working within these systems, I started questioning, “Why can I just get a job teaching English?” That made me really interested in language ideology and sociolinguistics as a field, because I was kind of grasping for things to explain the world around me.
You’ve been talking a lot about language ideology and language policy. Can you define these terms?
Language ideology is just what we believe about language but does not necessarily mean that we are evaluating those beliefs negatively. We all have beliefs about language and we use those beliefs to navigate the world.
Language ideology gets mapped onto our social reality and also creates our social reality; they’re both influencing each other all the time. Language policy refers to policies in place that govern how we use and learn languages. It typically refers to literal policies at the government level and especially how it impacts education.
What are you researching currently?
You have probably been on various social media platforms and have seen people teaching languages. I am doing my dissertation research on those teachers. I refer to them as “teacher-influencers,” because they’re using both the strategies of being an influencer and strategies of language teaching to build these platforms. There are all kinds of interesting negotiations around language ideology, legitimizing different language varieties and learners’ approaches to language learning. They essentially develop a curriculum across their posts.
I have also written a paper on a group of Taiwanese Mandarin “teacher-influencers.” Typically, Chinese as a second language refers to Mandarin. Through their posts, these teacher-influencers essentially argue that Taiwanese Mandarin is a distinct and legitimate variety in contrast to standard Mandarin, as it is typically taught in second language education. Standard language ideologies tend to be deeply rooted in education—think about how Spanish classes typically teach Spain Spanish— so it’s interesting to see people use social media to legitimize alternative varieties as language learning targets.
What methods have you been using so far to analyze data?
I do qualitative research, and I don’t think there are clear stages or boundaries between the different stages in data collection and analysis; I am doing it all. It’s hard to balance trying to collect relevant data and not be biased in what you are seeing. You have a position, and you impact this social world as soon as you enter it.
Some say the distinction between qualitative and quantitative research is that qualitative research is generating research questions that quantitative research can answer, but I don’t think that’s true. Qualitative research lets you explore things, maybe in different ways. Some of it comes down to your epistemologies, and what you believe the valuable questions to ask are. I don’t think that everything in life can be reduced to numbers or be statistically represented. I think we don’t spend enough time on talking about the philosophy that underlies the research.
What are some things that come up when doing research with online materials that might differ from other types of qualitative research?
In terms of the significance, we are living part of our lives online now. We have to look at it to understand how we act in the real world, especially when we are talking about something like language ideology. How does that language ideology get disseminated? At least partly, people’s experiences and beliefs are shaped by what they encounter online. To ignore online data would obscure part of the picture, especially with language learning, where much of it is now online. Educational institutions keep wanting to move to online formats, but don’t necessarily factor in how people actually use the internet.
What do you think are some implications for the research you’re working on?
In the education setting, we tend to legitimize whatever variety is being taught. But when you’re online, people can do what they want, and then other varieties can be legitimized. I would argue that it’s shaping how people approach language education. It’s more consumer based, and also outside of Rosetta Stone’s model or Duolingo’s model. I think one of the ways “teacher-influencers” advertise their classes is that you can interact with a real person. It’s presented as more authentic.
Do you have any advice for those looking to get involved in linguistics research or qualitative research?
Take advantage of the resources that you have on campus that can bring you into this sphere. Even if you don’t understand research articles initially, read it!
Read the introduction and read the discussion and see what you can glean from that. After you have gleaned more of the information, then you can go back and read the methodology and try to understand how they did this research. Over time, the literature review becomes more meaningful to you. I don’t like when people assume that undergraduates can’t read research articles; I include them in LING 222 to challenge students, which I think is valuable to introduce people to research.
I think sociolinguistics is something all of us are researching all the time without knowing, because it’s so tied to our lives. People don’t think about it, and then we just go about life without realizing how much has been impacted by language policy. Language is so interesting and it affects all our lives.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________
About the author
Lydia Oesterling is an undergraduate researcher and James Scholar in the process of switching majors from Linguistics & Teaching ESL to Speech and Hearing Science as well as Spanish. She is passionate about anything related to speech, linguistics, composition, and language acquisition.Currently, her interests lie in the speech and hearing science realm, potentially research related to child speech perception or applied psycholinguistics.