Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Children's Performance of Problem-Solving Genres

研究生希瑟·劳埃德（Heather lloyd）将在埃莉诺·奥克斯（Elinor Ochs）博士的指导下，对儿童如何学习和运用文化价值的沟通技能进行研究。她将研究儿童如何适当和利用语言和其他表达方式来保护他们的社会网络，获得声望，处理生活困境，以及以其他方式参与街头和家庭的社会生活。虽然许多关于类型的人类学研究都集中在成年人的交际世界和语言经济上，但我们对类型能力是如何在不同社区和环境中社会化和体现在童年中的知之甚少。这项研究将在那不勒斯内城进行为期12个月的实地考察。她将采用人种学和微互动设计来研究男孩和女孩如何使用口头和具体化的类型形式，如问候，动画，含沙射灯，抱怨和取笑，以达到社会目的，如加强关系，赢得尊重，说服别人做事，赢得争论。人种学方法将包括在家庭和同伴群体中的参与者观察，在这些环境中日常交流实践的视频和音频记录，深入的，开放式的访谈，以及青年叙述的家庭和社区之旅。这些数据将用于识别和分析1)语言、身体、情感和美学类型的特征和策略，以解决问题，并在社会、道德和物质世界中导航；2)家庭和同龄人对儿童体裁表演的态度；3)儿童如何被社会化到性别表达类型和道德框架。这项研究很重要，因为通过探索作为社会资源的类型，该研究将阐明解决问题的类型如何影响这个社区中的男孩和女孩在当地道德框架和经济突发事件方面的思考、感受和行动。这些发现将有助于阐明阶级和其他社会经济差异被儿童学习和行动的过程。资助这项研究也支持了研究生的教育。

Graduate student Heather Loyd, advised by Dr. Elinor Ochs, will undertake research on how children learn and deploy culturally-valued communicative skills. She will investigate how children appropriate and parlay speech and other expressive genres to secure their social networks, gain prestige, handle life predicaments and otherwise participate in the social life of the streets and family. While much anthropological research on genre has focused on the communicative worlds and speech economies of adults, we know very little of how genre competence is socialized and manifest in childhood across different communities and settings. The research will be carried out in 12 months of fieldwork in inner city Naples. She will employ an ethnographic and micro-interactional design to examine how boys and girls use verbal and embodied genre forms such as greetings, animation, innuendo, complaints, and teasing to attain social ends such as strengthen a relationship, gain respect, convince people to do things, and win an argument. Ethnographic methods will include participant-observation in homes and peer groups, video- and audio-recordings of everyday communicative practices in these settings, in-depth, open-ended interviews, and youth-narrated home and neighborhood tours. These data will be used to identify and analyze 1) linguistic, corporeal, affective, and aesthetic genre features and strategies displayed to problem-solve and navigate social, moral and material worlds; 2) family and peer group attitudes towards children's genre performances; and 3) how children are socialized into gendered expressive genres and moral frameworks. The research is important because by exploring genres as social resources, the study will illuminate how problem-solving genres affect how boys and girls in this community think, feel, and act in relation to local moral frameworks and economic contingencies. These findings will help to illuminate the processes by which class and other socioeconomic differences are learned and acted upon by children. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.