UTEP Language Acquisition Research Lab
The UTEP Language Acquisition Research Lab (LARLAB) since its creation in August 2006, has invited UTEP undergraduate and graduate students to start learning how to conduct language acquisition research through hands-on experience. The lab is open to all students interested in exploring first, second, and multilingual language acquisition.
In projects such as the bilingualism database, LARLAB students have the opportunity of jointly participating in ongoing research from beginning to end. Along the way, they are involved in all the tasks that seasoned language acquisition researchers perform, from creating proposals to testing participants, recording spontaneous speech, transcribing and analyzing data, and presenting results and project papers. Throughout the process, lab directors, Dr. María Blume and Dr. Ellen Courtney, provide guidance and mini-lessons in different research methods.
The lab directors also encourage students to create and develop their own independent research projects, either individually or in small groups. Not only can students count on help from the lab directors, but they can also recruit fellow LARLAB team members to carry out different tasks entailed in the independent projects. And LARLAB participants are on hand to provide feedback during practice research presentations.
LARLAB faculty and students at their weekly meetings, held Fridays 2pm at Liberal Arts 111.
One of our ongoing projects, Understanding Habitual Events: A Developmental Study with English- and Spanish-speaking children, funded by an URI Grant to Dr. Blume, started this Spring 2009. During the semester the students worked with Drs. Blume and Courtney on developing all the experiments and getting all permissions and during summer they were engaged in actually recording 2-4 year-old in both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. This is the first time that our students get such an experience and they are thrilled by how much they are learning about child development and language acquisition.
Opportunities for LARLAB student members extend well beyond the confines of the lab at UTEP. The LARLAB is a member of the Virtual Center for Language Acquisition Research. This center fosters interdisciplinary research and teaching in the area of language acquisition among researchers, even when they are working away from each other.
The VCLA just received a three-year NSF Grant, for the project Transforming the Primary Research Process Through Cybertool Dissemination: An Implementation of a Virtual Center for the study of Language Acquisition with Prof. Blume as a PI and Prof. Barbara Lust at Cornell University as a co-PI. This grant will help us develop a set of courses and cybertools to encourage long-distance (national and international) collaboration among researchers in Language Acquisition. The goals are to make students aware about the need for standardization and collaboration and the use of cybertools; and to change the way in which new generations of students and professionals engage in research.
This grant will allow our students to interact with students and researchers at eight US universities (including Cornell and MIT, among others) and one International university (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) and share knowledge, data, research methods, and foster new collaborative projects among them.
In addition to the success of the projects carried out in the lab during its first years, the LARLAB team has already developed an identity —an esprit du corps— and, since 2007, the membership has grown to 14 undergraduate and graduate students. Fortunately, so has the lab, having recently moved to more spacious quarters in Liberal Arts 111.
The team welcomes prospective student researchers who would like to attend the weekly LARLAB meetings on Fridays at 2:00 p.m.