LIN 199.23W: Exploring Heritage Languages

HW 3: A little fieldwork

You are very strongly encouraged to work in groups of two or three for this assignment. All group members will receive the same grade. It is up to you to decide how to divide the work. That's a very important skill. Discuss how to divide up the work among you.

You will be conducting original research and reporting your findings in a paper draft, one draft for the group. Each group will turn in one copy of their paper draft.

• Form a group in Quercus (use the "HW3" tab in "People")
• Generate several hypotheses - we will work on this in class as a group
• Design a study to test your hypotheses
• Conduct that study
• Look over some published research papers in sociolinguistics (for example, those assigned in Week 7) to provide you with some structure for organizing your paper
• Write a paper draft in which you

  • explain your hypotheses
  • carefully describe your methods
  • describe your results
  • explain how your results support or contradict your hypotheses
  • cite all published references in a bibliography at the end of the report.

Each student will conduct an interview with a member of one of the ethnic communities being investigated in the HLVC project (or some other Heritage Language speaker). You may conduct the interview in English or in the Heritage Language.

Because you will be conducting research that involves a human being, you must consider the Ethics Requirements of the University of Toronto. This requires you to understand and follow the procedures for obtaining informed consent from your research participants. You will find the Consent Form in Quercus (Week 3 folder).

• You will need to adapt the Consent Form, providing your contact information and substituting in the relevant language name.

Also download and read over the EOQ questionnaire from Quercus (Week 3 folder). You want to be very familiar with the questions as you ask them so that you put your participant at ease by asking them casually/conversationally.

• Adapt the questions for the language/homeland you are investigating.

Each student will recruit one participant. Ask that person if they are willing to spend about 20 minutes helping you with a research project and establish a time to meet with them online. Make sure one other group member is available at that time as well.

Meet your participant at the agreed upon time. Go over the Consent Form with them (send them a copy and share it on your screen, if you are meeting online). Ask them each of the questions in the EOQ, trying to get as complete answers as possible. Working in pairs, one of you can ask questions and one of you can write down the answers.

When you have finished, be sure your participant has a copy of the Consent Form. Thank your participant and ask whether you can contact them again if you have follow-up questions.

Next, you will code each participant's answer in an Excel spreadsheet which you can download from Quercus (Guess which folder :-) ). "Coding" means assigning a number to each of their answers so that it is easy to compare across speakers, as discussed in class.

The final step in analysis is to compare the responses of your speakers to the general trends for other speakers in the HLVC project. You will need to select a subset of speakers that you want to compare from the spreadsheet in Quercus. You will also decide what parts of the questionnaire you are interested in comparing, in order to test your hypothesis.

Once you have collected and analyzed your data, write up your research project, following the guidelines above.

Submit the spreadsheet with your group's 3 (or however many) speakers coded in it along with your paper draft.

Last updated Jan. 20, 2023