20 If a picture is worth 1000 words, what about a video? Using video-documentary to connect students to the community through sociolinguistic field work
Jennifer Lang-Rigal, Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Rationale: Students have few opportunities to gain hands-on skills in the classroom and the chance to apply knowledge from a course to real-life problems and situations. Even more so for students of foreign language, their interaction with the language is often limited in speakers and context; it is challenging to find ways for them to use the target language in an authentic way.
This can be resolved by connecting students with speakers of the language outside of the classroom, or virtually through web-conferencing. The benefits of this kind of interaction go beyond improving language skills to building self-confidence, cultural competence and motivation to keep practicing the language. In the greater community our students inhabit, there is a diversity of languages and language varieties, and after English the most predominant of these is Spanish spoken in the US. Often the use of Spanish in public spaces of the US is misunderstood, or even discriminated against. Students of Spanish should be able to connect to the speakers within their community, and non-Spanish speaking members of the community can also benefit from learning about the Spanish speakers that live among them and hopefully increase understanding among all.
These are the rationale in the creation of this video-documentary project in which students from my SPAN 404 course (Spanish in the US) interview local speakers of Spanish, analyze and reflect on their experience and the data they’ve collected, and then share their final product as part of a growing video database documenting the use of Spanish in Harrisonburg.
Plan for design and implementation: The design for my project integrates the teaching of SPAN 404 (Spanish in the US) to a linguistic documentation project I call “Spanish in Harrisonburg.” The students’ role is pivotal to the documenting of language and is scaffolded into the course curriculum. The project will commence Spring semester 2020 when the SPAN 404 course is offered. In SPAN 404 students learn the history, geography and sociology of Spanish speakers, language, and culture throughout our country. They are introduced to linguistic terminology and sociolinguistic theory so they may accurately describe and interpret the Spanish language variation that exists within and outside of the United States. This foundational knowledge, gained in the first 9 weeks, is then applied in a class project documenting the use of Spanish in Harrisonburg. In weeks 10-12, we learn sociolinguistic fieldwork methods to prepare for the signature project, an interview of a Spanish-speaking individual from Harrisonburg. After learning how to conduct a sociolinguistic interview and coming up with their own questions and topics for the interview, students practice in class with mock interviews.
Next, we learn how to audio and video record the interview. It is especially important to have a high quality audio recording for linguistic analysis, so the use of a lavalier mic is demonstrated, as well as the basics of using a camera, tripod, and choosing the best lighting and framing for an interview. Students also are introduced to the IRB process since they must complete human subjects training to be added to the IRB (by March 2020) in order to participate in data collection. Students can assist with the recruitment of participants by advertising to people they know. In late March, each student will carry out an interview (in Spanish) with a community member that speaks Spanish and is not affiliated with JMU. This encourages them to break away from the comfort “bubble” of campus and bridge that difficult cultural gap between the Harrisonburg community and the JMU community. The interviews are arranged individually and done outside of class, usually in the informant’s place of work, home, or a public setting. After the interviews, we learn about data management, primarily transcribing and coding their interviews. In late April, the students write a paper contextualizing the sociolinguistic variables heard in their interviews, they receive feedback before preparing their final draft, due finals week.
In this paper, students compare the linguistic and social profile of their speaker to what we have learned about US Spanish. They also reflect on their own language practice and identity as they compare their experiences to that of their informant’s. The project unites almost every learning objective written into this course. The videos will be uploaded to the project website in May 2020. This timeline will be repeated each Spring semester as the SPAN 404 is offered and can be carried out indefinitely.
I have piloted this project with previous SPAN 404 classes in Fall 2017, Spring 2018, and Spring 2019. My students performed a total of 17 interviews, most of them audio and video recorded and uploaded to a website I created for housing our linguistic database of interviews, https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/spanhburg/.
This project could benefit from instructional design support in organizing the database, making it searchable and easy to navigate and find in web searches. This project also needs reliable recording equipment for conducting the interviews.
Research design/data analysis: This project spans the entire semester since it is integrated into the course curriculum, and it can be repeated each time the SPAN 404 course is taught to contribute to the growing database of interviews documenting the diverse Spanish-speakers in Harrisonburg. To gauge the influence of this project on the students, I will ask them to write a personal reflection following completion of their part in the project. This will guide them to recognize the areas in which they have grown or struggled during the project itself, and it will provide me more consistent, and rich feedback on the effectiveness of this project design.
To analyze the influence of the project on those people who might access our database through the website, I will collect analytics, comments, and messages from visitors to the site. These techniques of gathering feedback can inform any changes to how the project is carried out and shared.
Outcome of the innovative and creative teaching: The sociolinguistic interviews allow students to develop confidence in their communication in Spanish while making connections with community members they would otherwise never speak with. This challenging fieldwork pushes them to speak Spanish with an unknown native speaker. It challenges them to try and get to know this stranger in a short time, and in analyzing their interview, to make connections between their life and language, and the greater story of Spanish in the US. In their written analysis, students reflect on their own linguistic profile and identity. Although it may last only 30 minutes in total, this interview experience is transformative to the Spanish student. This project asks them to fulfill multiple roles they may have not imagined for themselves, of language expert, of videographer, of ambassador from JMU, of bilingual, of interviewer. They have told me afterwards how the experience intimidated and then empowered them. This project focuses on the Spanish of Harrisonburg through the interviews of JMU students, but it provides a framework that can be applied to any university or city in the US.
Plan for result dissemination: Through documenting naturalistic language use over time this project seeks to create a database of linguistic samples that will continue to benefit the SPAN 404 course and other Spanish classes. The project website can house the videos from the interviews as an archive and display for teaching and research purposes. Our growing database will also be available to other researchers and teachers learning about Spanish in the US. I intend to present this project at the National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language and the Spanish in the US conferences.
The integration of the sociolinguistic interview as a signature assignment can be applied to nearly any course in intermediate-advanced Spanish. The supporting assignments, such as the speaker identification activity, will be shared as an Open Educational Resource for foreign language teaching, and in particular, Heritage Spanish, on COERLL’s website https://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/project/heritage-spanish.
