In variationist SLA, the scarcity of studies taking a process-based approach to L2 development of sociolinguistic competence (= "the capacity to recognize and produce socially appropriate speech in context" [Lyster, 1994, p. 263]) has been repeatedly lamented. Product-based longitudinal studies relying on two to three measurements have hitherto provided insufficient evidence as to the dynamics of the sociolinguistic developmental process, and have moreover neglected environmental/psychological stimuli for change given their reliance on quantitative or qualitative methods. Additionally, variationist SLA has concentrated predominately on language production and left perception-based studies in the cold minority, despite sociolinguistic competence equally involving sophisticated interpretive abilities (e.g., identifying ideological/social meanings and mapping these onto specific sociolinguistic variants/varieties [Chappell/Kanwit, 2022]).
To fill these gaps, the present talk focuses on the dynamics of emerging sociolinguistic judgements of standard German and Bavarian-Austrian dialect among L2 learners of German in Austria from a CDST perspective. Four subjects were tested 10 times over three months; two participants had immediately arrived in Austria at the beginning of the experiment, and two had been living in Austria for seven months. Each subject completed eight sociolinguistic matched-guise tasks and an introspective interview at each measurement, amounting to 320 matched-guise tasks and 40 interviews. Additionally, at the final measurement, subjects were presented with their trajectories and asked to consider retrodictively why their attitudes underwent periods of significant change and/or remained stable. We integrated generalized additive mixed effects modeling to identify rapid developmental phases vs. more stable phases with qualitative content analyses to explain phase shifts, addressing the following research questions:
(a)When do we find periods of significant change in L2 learners' sociolinguistic evaluative judgements of standard German and Austrian dialect?
(b)How do the learners explain the phase shifts in their sociolinguistic evaluative judgements both in real time and retrodictively?
With respect to developmental jumps, the results show that while the evaluative judgements of the four learners underwent significant change over time, the individual developmental paths, each with all its variation, were quite different from one another: Some subjects' evaluative judgements exclusively underwent periods of significant increase, others' a mixture of significant increase and decrease, while one subject's evaluative judgements underwent no notable change. In exploring possible environmental and psychological reasons for change in learners' evaluative judgements, qualitative content analyses of the introspective interviews revealed affective states (e.g., emotions towards the learning environment), experiences/interactions with the naturalistic context, and goal complexes as stimuli for change behind (a) differences in evaluative judgement trajectories across participants and (b) significant changes in subjects' individual evaluative judgement trajectories. Qualitative analyses of the retrodictive data, however, provided little additional explanatory insights as to further reasons behind learners' individual trajectories. This underscored the high predictive power of the real time introspective interview method in explaining learners' intra-individual variability. Taken as a whole, the results implore the field of variationist SLA to expand in terms of method integration and CDST-inspired approaches so as to better capture stimuli for change in learners' evolving multivarietal sociolinguistic repertoires.
