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

芝加哥大学研究生乔纳森·罗萨将在苏珊·加尔博士的指导下，研究学校教育和语言在创建美国民族类别中的作用。这位研究人员将在芝加哥一所新成立的高中进行这项研究，这所高中主要是为说西班牙语的学生服务的。研究人员将使用混合方法研究学生如何运用西班牙语和英语的不同语域，这两种语域似乎作为社会统一和分化的模式交替运行。他将开展参与者观察研究；使用空间和认知测绘技术；对学校的创作进行档案研究；并进行非结构化和半结构化的访谈。此外，他将收集和分析自发的语言数据，以跟踪学生对发声和符号学的使用，以产生民族登记。这项研究之所以重要，是因为它将有助于语言变化的社会语言学理论，也因为最近拉美裔美国人作为美国最大的少数群体的出现，提高了人们对地方和国家认同之间关系的兴趣。学校是形成和协商地方身份的重要场所，通常是通过现场社会科学研究可以最好地阐明的微妙过程。资助这项研究还将有助于社会科学家的教育。

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.