TBB 199.19W: Exploring Heritage Languages

Primary Research Project #2

For this assigment, you have a choice between two tasks. The first one listed (HL Option) is for students who are fluent in a heritage language and will use those abilities in the assignment. The second one listed (ENG Option) is for students who choose not to work in a Heritage Language.

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.

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

Each group will turn in a hard copy of their report in class, on the due date.

For whichever assignment you choose, you will:

• 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 6) 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.

HL Option: Linguistic analysis

Your task is to design and conduct a research project that tells us about possible differences in pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary used by different generations of HL speakers. You will compare three speakers: one first generation, one second generation, and one third generation. They should otherwise be as matched as possible (in terms of age and sex, at least).

ENG Option: Ethnic Orientation Questionnaire

For this project, you will each 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. Download the consent form from Bb (Content > Heritage Language Resources).

• If you are investigating a language other than those included in the HLVC Project, you will need to adapt the consent letter (by substituting in the correct homeland and language names).

Also download and read over the EOQ questionnaire from Bb (Content > Heritage Language Resources). 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. Make sure one other group member is available at that time as well.

Meet your participant at the agreed upon time and place. Go over the consent form with them. Ask them each of the questions in the EOQ, trying to get as complete answers as possible. You should work in pairs (at least) so that 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.

You will need to code each participant's answer in an Excel spreadsheet which you can download from Bb (Content > Heritage Language Resources). "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 EOQ_ALL.xls spreadsheet in Bb and decide what parts of the questionnaire you are interested in comparing. Explain what you are trying to show/understand.

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

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

Last updated Jan. 2, 2019