Dissertation Research: The Semiotics of Socialization: Gaelic-Medium Education and Language Revival in Scotland

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Schools play a central role in efforts to preserve minority languages all over the world, including the Gaelic language revitalization movement in Scotland. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Ms. Vanessa Will, under the direction of Dr. Judith Irvine, will conduct fieldwork in a Gaelic-English bilingual community on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, where most children learn Gaelic in a language immersion program in the first years of elementary school.Acquiring a language is more complex than the learning of words and grammar rules alone. The Gaelic spoken by these school children may not sound like the local form of Gaelic, may exhibit grammatical differences, and may contain words that are not recognized by other speakers or are considered inappropriate. Students learning the language in the school setting may use Gaelic correctly in grammatical terms, but older speakers often think that they are not speaking appropriately, and therefore do not use the language with these new speakers. This dissertation research project will investigate what aspects of the language learned by students in school create these communicative stumbling blocks, what effects they have on the students' interactions with other Gaelic speakers, and how students and other speakers negotiate these linguistic conflicts. The research will utilize long-term participation in and observation of language use in the community, interviews and surveys of Gaelic-speakers, and a role-playing task for Gaelic immersion-educated children to understand how children learn to use language in socially accepted ways. There will be extensive audio- and video-recording of interactions between the children and adult Gaelic speakers in the school as well as at home and at play. The analysis of these recordings will pay close attention to the content and shape of these interactions to see if and how adult speakers help children understand how to speak Gaelic properly. This research will help linguists and other researchers interested in language to better understand how children learn to use language in socially acceptable ways. It will uncover social and cultural aspects of language-learning that are crucial to the success of minority-language education programs. This research will also help in the design of education programs to ensure that students will be able to use the language outside the school - an important goal of language revitalization efforts.