Proyectos
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Presentadores Plenarios
Kim Potowski, U. of Illinois at Chicago Luiz Amaral, U. of Massachusetts, Amherst
The effects of dual language education on children’s Spanish in the U.S.
Multiple studies around the U.S. have shown that dual immersion programs that teach in Spanish between 50-90% of the day result in higher levels of both English language learning and academic achievement. But what about students’ Spanish? This study explores in detail the Spanish proficiency of two groups of home Spanish-speaking students in one Chicago public school: those attending the dual immersion program and those in the English program. We will examine their listening, speaking, and reading scores as well as several representative writing samples. All measures show that dual immersion results in much stronger levels of Spanish. I also explain several important challenges faced by these schools, arguing that they can and should represent an important social justice component for Latino children. |
Experimental Work and Native Latin American Languages:
A Paradigm Shift to Support a Collaborative Research Agenda The amount of experimental work in native Latin American languages has been on the rise for quite some time now. It is slowly helping shift the paradigm in research on indigenous languages, from the one based on the collection and analysis of large corpora produced by a group of informants to the development of experiments that require frequent interactions with different groups of people representing a larger spectrum of the local population. Academically, adding a new set of elicitation techniques based on the experimental tradition has helped us explore linguistic properties that were once difficult to describe or simply inaccessible. Moreover, the study of language development in native bilingual contexts has also provided new tools for us to look into language change in indigenous contexts during the acquisition process, among other things. However, maybe more importantly than its academic impact, this paradigm shift can potentially affect the relationship between researchers and communities to the degree where existing research agendas would need to change. In this talk, I will describe the evolution of a research agenda that started with a clear focus on language acquisition and linguistic theory, but during the last decade needed to evolve to include topics that more readily responded to local demands. I will start by showing the design and results from some early experiments on recursive relative clauses and prepositional phrases in Wapichana (an Arawak language spoken in Brazil and Guyana). I will then describe how the work on pedagogical projects, such as the development of assessment tools and the creation of pedagogical grammars and early literacy materials, affected the design of current research projects on the acquisition of verb morphology in Wapichana and positional verbs in Zapotec (Otomanguean - Mexico), and on a literacy development project in Chatino (Otomanguean - Mexico). I will finish my presentation with some personal considerations about how experimental fieldwork could potentially influence our theoretical choices as linguists. |