My personal statement for the award this year...
To Whom It May Concern:
During the two years of graduate linguistic courses at ASU, my interests in natural languages and all of their subtleties have steadily been increasing. As a direct result, my inquisitive nature regarding what people say and why they say it has been shifting more towards to the evaluative-analytical level, rather than the staying dormant at the conceptual-pondering level. The knowledge I've acquired from classes like, for example, "Spanish Language in America", "Spanish Pragmatics", "Advanced Topics in Sociolinguistics" and "Spanish Phonology", has heightened my interests to include more sociological and historical factors rather than those purely linguistic. These additional sources of information have included books, articles and talks on colonization, ethnic distribution, political revolutions, social stratification, indigenous populations, geographical factors, etc... I have recently found a particular interest in Creole languages, especially those rooted in Romance languages, and how they've taken hold and stayed alive in the Caribbean region. I have accumulated readings on the history of the Spanish, French and Portuguese languages and their natural tendencies, the African languages from which they have made contact, the generational differences in the lives of the pidginizing and creolizing groups, and the maintenance of the creoles, themselves. Even though some of these topics aren't made available through coursework in the Spanish Linguistics program at ASU, I make a conscious and consistent effort to incorporate this information into the classroom when it can be beneficial to the learning ecology. I have come to know linguistics as a diverse and multifaceted discipline in which many of the concepts, be them specific to particular speech conditions, can be abstracted from and applied to other contexts while still maintaining its original valor.
After graduation, I plan to enter a doctoral program that offers extensive coursework in sociolinguistics and pragmatics, preferably with faculty who have published in and regarding the Romance languages. My goal is to expand my versatility as an instructor and researcher in order to be as productive as possible as an academic. Here at ASU, I am the recipient of GPSA Teaching Excellence Award in 2010, have taught three different courses online (as well as four different courses in the classroom), and am now the faculty-elected technical assistant for all of the Spanish Teaching Assistants (known as the Blackboard Power User). Except for the current semester, I have taken 3 graduate courses per term to ensure my coursework completion after my fourth semester. Just as well, I have taken lower-level coursework in French (111, 201, 202) and have began taking upper-level Portuguese (201, 314). I plan to be able to read and cite academic works in these languages, teach them at different levels of instruction, and hopefully publish one day in them, as well. My graduation this December leaves me 6-8 months until my doctoral program would start in the Fall of 2012. My tentative plan is to teach English (or Spanish) to Portuguese speakers in Brazil for that time period, collaborating with faculty before to work on a research project involving the Portunhol/Portuñol phenomenon or the Portuguese-speaking population there, itself. In doing this, I will acquire teaching experience, contacts, fluency in Portuguese, and a valuable foreign experience.
My thesis data collection will take place this summer. I have considered the less represented regions in Central America and also certain rural regions of the Caribbean for pragmatics research, not quite having settled on either yet. Currently, for my class with Dr. Cerrón-Palomino, I am conducting some sociolinguistic research in the Cibao region of the Dominican Republic this Spring Break. I hope to present this empirical research and papers from previous semesters at conferences this fall. I have presented my pragmatics paper "Comparing Learner Performance to Native Speaker Realization of High-Imposition Requests" at the 13th Annual Spanish Graduate Student Conference at ASU last March. I plan on presenting my phonetics paper "La lateralización del español puertorriqueño" at this year's conference, as well. After my research has been completed this summer, my plan for the Fall of 2012 includes thesis writing, conference presentations, and preparation for doctoral studies.
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