Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Learning to Hear a Nation's Limits: Language Ideologies and the Production of EthnoRacial Difference in a U.S. High School

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University of Chicago graduate student, Jonathan Rosa, under the direction of Dr. Susan Gal, will undertake research on the role of schooling and language in the creation of ethnoracial categories in the United States. The investigator will conduct the research in a new Chicago high school created to serve a student body largely comprised of Spanish speakers. The researcher will use a mixed-methods research approach to investigate how students deploy different registers of Spanish and English, which appear to operate alternately as modes of social unification and differentiation. He will carry out participant observation research; employ spatial and cognitive mapping techniques; do archival research on the school's creation; and conduct unstructured and semi-structured interviews. In addition, he will gather and analyze spontaneous linguistic data to track student use of voicing and semiotics to produce ethnoracial enregisterment. The research is important because it will contribute to sociolinguistic theories of language change, and because the recent emergence of Hispanics as the largest American minority group has heightened interest in the relationship between local and national identity. Schools are an important site for the formation and negotiation of local identity, often through subtle processes that on-site, social science research can best elucidate. Funding this research also will contribute to the education of a social scientist.