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

学校在保护世界各地少数民族语言的努力中发挥着核心作用，包括苏格兰的盖尔语复兴运动。在国家科学基金会的资助下，瓦内萨·威尔将在朱迪思·欧文博士的指导下，在苏格兰刘易斯岛的一个盖尔语-英语双语社区进行田野调查，那里的大多数孩子在小学一年级的时候会通过语言沉浸项目学习盖尔语。掌握一门语言比仅仅学习单词和语法规则要复杂得多。这些学生说的盖尔语听起来可能不像当地的盖尔语，可能会表现出语法上的差异，并且可能包含其他说话者不能识别的单词或被认为是不合适的单词。在学校学习盖尔语的学生可能会在语法方面正确地使用盖尔语，但年长的说话者往往认为他们说话不恰当，因此不会与新说话者一起使用盖尔语。这篇论文的研究项目将调查学生在学校学习的语言的哪些方面造成了这些交际障碍，它们对学生与其他盖尔语使用者的互动有什么影响，以及学生和其他说话者如何解决这些语言冲突。这项研究将利用对社区语言使用的长期参与和观察、对说盖尔语的人的采访和调查，以及盖尔语浸入式教育的儿童的角色扮演任务，以了解儿童如何以社会接受的方式学习使用语言。将有大量的音频和视频记录儿童和说盖尔语的成年人在学校以及在家里和游戏中的互动。对这些录音的分析将密切关注这些互动的内容和形式，看看成人演讲者是否以及如何帮助儿童了解如何正确地说盖尔语。这项研究将帮助语言学家和其他对语言感兴趣的研究人员更好地理解儿童如何学习以社会接受的方式使用语言。它将揭示语言学习的社会和文化方面，这些方面对少数民族语言教育项目的成功至关重要。这项研究还将有助于教育计划的设计，以确保学生能够在校外使用语言--这是语言振兴努力的重要目标。

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.