NSF REU Site: Increasing Diversity in the Linguistic Sciences through Research on Language and Social Mobility
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Program Overview
This REU site is designed to increase diversity in the linguistic sciences by investigating the linguistic choices that underrepresented minority students make as they navigate higher education. The research sheds light on the role of language in social mobility, an important but understudied aspect of educational and economic advancement. It therefore supports the prosperity of underrepresented minorities and many findings are likely to generalize to and thus benefit other American populations.The primary training objective of the REU is to provide undergraduates from HBCUs and other MSIs with training and experience in the methods of linguistic research as well as in-depth mentoring and professional development in order to support their pursuit of a Ph.D. in linguistics or a related field. Research methods include sociolinguistic interviews, corpus building, statistical analysis of grammatical patterns, instrumental phonetic analysis, and discourse analysis. The REU contributes to linguistics, sociology, and education by shedding light on the role of language in higher education and African-Americans’ social mobility.
